Yes we are down to 12-14 players right now. We have 17 gyms in town and same amount around is. I got more than half of them gold and i'm nearing the 300 raids (not doing unneccessary raids, mostly 4-5. lv 3s only if i'd lose a pass on a slow day)

tl;dr : I can understand your situation cause our situation is the same

BUT : Having them twice a day would take the fun out of an exclusive thing. Mewtwo would be as common as Ho Oh...and then what? Then you wouldn't need special invites for it.

Niantic has to tune the damn system that people alike get those invites, though. Maybe once a week or so.

Earlier today I've talked about it at a Ho Oh raid. We need a system that maybe lets us "unlock" those EX raids.

If within a week 100 raidpasses have been spent in your area then the people participating get an EX invite. Stuff like that. That motivates people to do raids and rewards them.

Those numbers can obviously be tuned if you have more people around. Say it's 100 passes for small towns like ours but 10000 for big cities such as SF or so.

In the end it's the same system as the Go Travel event. Achieve something -> get rewarded. Spend certain amount of passes in your area -> your area gets an EX raid and so on

But only once a week. You can even call it a weekly quest for all I care...