David, I took a long hiatus as well, and was also surprised by some of the changes. The first thing I did was try to reacquire my old favorite cards. I was surprised to find that T205's hadn't moved up much (if any), and the same for common-back T206's. The big surprise was how T206 backs and 'misfits' had skyrocketed. Finally, the T206 Wagner (which I had not been following) has gone into the stratosphere - much faster than I would have predicted.
As someone else mentioned, LOTS of small auction houses, and ebay is no longer as fun of a place to look for cards. Because of all the auction houses, the big discussions on auction night seem to have died, especially the chats we used to have. Plus, we don't have the normal nightly chats - that was great, but that has probably died because of the lack of interest in ebay, which is what we primarily talked about.
The board is bigger and definitely better. Great to see people discussing photographs, as there were only a few of us ten years ago. Lots of new 'experts' now
. A lot more memorabilia discussers now, and some massive collections/collectors that were either not here or were lower profile. Good stuff.