Ha ha. I can honestly say that I hadn't noticed in the least. In fact, I hardly posted at all for a month or so, and then it seems that just recently there's been a new crop of interesting threads. And there's been a new bunch of intelligent people just arrived with good points (even if I don't always agree). I was thinking that the discussion level has been noticeably improved, but I didn't attribute it to the absence of anyone.
BTW, where are these great threads going on from which we are excluded? Maybe there on another server instead of FR, because I certainly haven't seen any here.