Org-blocks Readability

Thank you for the wonderful theme. I use Emacs largely for writing prose, and I mostly use orgmode. There are three readability issues I have with the theme and org-blocks:

1. By using an italic font for the blocks, if one uses emphasis markers within the block, there is no differentiation with the rest of the text. I would like to see an option to turn off italic just for org-block formatting, so that emphasized (italic) text marked with "/.../", and nothing else will show as italic within the block. This would be helpful with long quotes and verse.

2. I use org-blocks with the "grayscale" option, which is wonderful for differentiating the block from the surrounding text, but I find that the bluish text in the block with the gray background is too low contrast and hard to proof-read for long quotations. Would it be possible to have an option to have the same white font color as regular non-block text?

3. I use Pandoc style citations extensively within orgmode documents, but currently the citations are not highlighted, which makes them blend into the text. A Pandoc style citation looks like the following [@dhlawrencephoenix:_letter_dd, p. 79]. Would it be possible to have these citations highlighted? Note: it is important that normal bracketed text such as "[...]" would not be highlighted.

Thank you.