@manton mentioned a new editor on core int but didn’t think it was ready for release and I never use the web one so I don’t know what it presented like before.
FYI to make use of the b, i and link buttons you have to have text selected as it is wrapping the markdown automatically for you, its not switching you into b or i mode like it would in a word editor. I know some of this from my own approaches to a “rich” markdown editor, the active and wrap is the simplest approach but as you have shown is is not obvious. What I did and looking now at discourses editor the buttons are always usable and when tapped they add in dummy text strong text and highlight the dummy text for you to quickly write over.
example of text injected when tapping b button
**strong text**
As regards the quotations it has changed the way this was handled before from what I can tell, so that only by including a space will it give you a line break but this then stylistically puts in a “paragraph” break and doesn’t continue the quote, so you get all those extra gaps in your post, it should handle it like this using the > between paragraphs to create a line break but stay in quote style like this
first quote of thing you want to say
second part of the quote from same author strong text
example of markdown
>first quote of thing you want to say
>
>second part of the quote from same author strong text
If manton can tweak the editor to these approaches I think it will improve the UX