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 don't share your view that there is more interest for questions here than on the main site. What I do see is this:

* There are more 'subject experts' here on MSO than on SO for specific tags. The population on SO is mostly interested in their own tags while people here are broader since it concerns the entire site, which everyone knows.
* There are far fewer posts on MSO. Thus they got more attention per question than questions on the main site. Also the 'hot meta questions' box will draw even more attention.
* Concerning the votes: opinions draw more votes in general since people want to have their opinion reflected. A question on SO itself is mostly judged on the correctness and has less 'emotional' way of voting.
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.