I understand what you’re saying.
this works as a reply without any other text
[quote] some text... [/quote]
this doesn’t
[quote=me] some text... [/quote]
The reason is still the same as I mentioned above. When you add the = character, it matches internal Discourse quotes. So, the assumption is that it’s a quote from another post, and it gets stripped.
You can do something like this if you want to add an external quote.
> me:
>
> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore manga
renders like so
me:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore manga
Short of that, you’ll need to look into adding custom functionality to your site.
A change in how Discourse handles this in core is unlikely given that this hasn’t come up before. The benefit of stripping internal quotes far outways the use case of allowing posts that only contain an external quote where you manually add the source.