Question: I often see the number of votes/answers/general interest in questions on Meta Stack Overflow to be much higher in number. There isn't much doubt that the questions here are a lot more interesting and prone to debate.

But shouldn't people spend time giving answers there rather than here?

I mean, that is what is more productive, right?

Answer: 
I see two primary reasons:

1. The people that really *use* Stack Overflow, the people constantly on it (often with high rep counts) are the frequent visitors here, because they care about the site.
2. Which, combined with the fact that meta gets *far* fewer posts than SO (maybe 100 a day instead of thousands) means that each of those questions gets attention from many, if not all, of them whereas each main site question can only get attention from a few.

Thus, the view/vote counts tend to be much higher here.
There is no reputation linked with votes on meta stack overflow. Upvoting or downvoting here has no effect whatsoever on what we can do in the sites, which makes the voices in our heads lot more calmer about up or down voting content.

that, and votes here are more of an expression of our consent (or disconsent) with the content that we see, not if said content is of high quality or greatly researched.