They don't just miss you, they like you. You and I joined the same day back in 2001. They made us move over from the old board. I have learned a lot from you. @lordmarcovan joined about the same time. Probably more here on CT, I can't remember. All new folks in charge of CU today. I believe they would welcome you back.
They banned noted author, Roger Burdette, some years ago, and there are few people on the planet who have more to offer than he does. They re-instated him a couple of years ago.
CarolJ banned me once, for 8 or 12 hours or so, over some Open Forum hijinks. (That should tell you how long ago this was.) I groveled and repented properly and was let back in. Phil Arnold (under his original "Darkhorse" username) was the one who started said hijinks, as I recall, and I think he got in some hot water too. We used to act like goofy kids there. (Heck, he was a kid back then.) Look what happened to him vis-a-vis PCGS. (Which reminds me, I wanna take advantage of that TrueView special they've got going on...)
Maybe it wasn't quite 17 years, I thought I got banned before the book came out in 2003, maybe it was a little later. I did talk more over there back then, had over 13,000 posts when I was banned.
I am a veritable windbag, and had racked up about 65K posts as of 2016 or so, when I migrated over here. The software change over there robbed me of more than 15K posts, and I show as having 41,092 now. The old software had a Top Ten user list by post count, and I think I was at #7 then. I pop in over there now and then, but I dislike the new software and am more comfortable over here. Still have a lot of respect and regard for most of the folks over there, though. And of course there is a lot of overlap between here and there.