Please give us Markdown in Slack already. How can that be much more "difficult" compared to Slack's own formatting?

At least give me the possibility to temporarily disable formatting, e.g. to not make bold when using asterisks. No, using inline code formatting is not a viable option. I simply want to have asterisks shown as normal text. I'm fine with escaping with e.g. backslashes. That's kinda normal.