What year was this? For as long as I've known you, you haven't touched the track so it's been at least, what 5-6 years? I'm sad you had a bad experience, that kind of stuff doesn't happen anymore. Sounds like NESBA, which yea a lot of CR's came over from but N2 is a completely different organization than NESBA was. And many people that have ridden with both N2 and NESBA say they are night and day.
Mid-O's Novice group is very structured and it's probably not a bad place to get started if you don't want to go the STT/N2 route.