Sorry, but I have to correct you here.
It's literally the CM's job to write a report every single week on sentiment regarding a wide variety of topics including specific issues brought up, questions we see frequently, and general sentiment. That joins a larger report that makes its way up.
The Forum is not the only medium through which we get feedback, so keep that in mind. There is Discord, Twitch, Social Media, Supertest, Clan Supertest, Privateers, Community Contributors, and even the Wiki Editors. When an issue shows up across multiple feedback sources, we know it's pervasive. If one person tells me in the forums that the Ohio is objectively worse than the Montana because 12 barrels is clearly better than 8, then that feedback won't likely go anywhere meaningful. When folks come into the forums and let us know that the survey regarding insurance questions really upset them - we notice.
I would be very surprised if you or anyone else were banned for saying something mundane to another user. We ban people for violating the EULA and Terms of Service - and it's not draconian. One of the most constant pieces of feedback we've received is that we're often too lenient on people causing trouble in-game, so we recently took a look at our rules and talked more thoroughly about how and when to enforce them.
Bans do get lifted. Sometimes we do make errors. Folks will write our CS and explain why they believe their chatban was in error due to a language or cultural discrepancy and we will have an internal discussion about it to see if we can verify that maybe we misunderstood. Sometimes that results in the ban being lifted. Sometimes it results in us determining the person is just trying to dodge consequences. It's not a guarantee either way.