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I am not writing this to dismiss what you've just written or try to denigrate you, but my eyes have glazed over by the middle of the first paragraph. Can you explain what metaphysics are to someone who has studied only physics? If you asked me to give an example of metaphysics I would've replied with the principle of least action, but that's not what you meant, did you?
It is the study of being as such, as distinct from the special sciences which study being under some aspect, as we might say roughly and imprecisely that modern physical science studies being as corporeal and quantitative (philosophical physics like Aristotle's studies being as corporeal but not quantitative, heh).
So metaphysics is about rising above particular kinds and concepts of being to the most general analysis of being. And there we get to questions like: we know there's at least one sort of being (the corporeal kind), is that it, or is there a kind of being that is incorporeal or supersensible? That question is the main theme of Plato's corpus.
And it studies categories applicable to being in general (not just one kind of being), like causation, or contingency and necessity. So there you will get questions like whether the existence of contingent beings ipso facto implies the existence of a necessary being, and what attributes a necessary being must have in virtue of its necessity. Or whether a chain of causes implies a first element in it and what we can say about such an element based on the properties it must have in order to be the first element in such a chain.
This may (or may not, like I said I'm still learning) help to explain why the validity of metaphysics as a discipline that grasps being as it is is so critical for classical theistic arguments. If all of these concepts - causation, contingency, necessity etc. - are just a matter of how we think about the stuff that appears to us, we can't use it to draw conclusions that go beyond what appears to us, because it's basically just a schema for organizing all of that (this is why Kantianism threw such a major wrench in philosophy). But if it's grasping being as it is, then we can.
I'd guess the lack of interest in metaphysics, then, is due to the wholehearted embrace of empiricism by rationalists. Most of us are mainly concerned with empirical claims, and this is pretty much a settled matter in this universe of discourse. There are no guardrails, of course, but maybe a lack of interest.
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