I'll suggest that the problem with contemporary opera is a Sturgeon's Law problem. The opera canon (depending on where one draws the line) is somewhere between 100 and 400 works -- really only that top 100 are presented with any frequency. Those 100 were drawn from probably a few thousand operas created in the years when opera was a popular entertainment for the prosperous.

There just aren't that many contemporary operas being composed and staged -- more than there were twenty years ago, but even including University productions I'd guess there are at most a dozen new operas being created each year in the Anglophone world.