I've often been frustrated trying to put more than one asterisk (not italic tag) in an HN comment.

Serious question, what happened to WYSIWYG? The Web has supported it for like 20 years, why have we standardized on clunky in-line markup for rich text entry, pretty much everywhere?

FWIW, you can indent text in a HN comment (by a few spaces), and you get

  a Blockquote like this, 
  and *asterisks* survive: 2**47

WYSIWYG is kinda crap on mobile. A checkbox saying "Don't format" would be nice, though.

It'd be nice if the formatter would realise that two asterisks in a row aren't emphasising any text and therefore just leave them as is.