The basic constitution of Skirmish prevents it from being as rewarding as Great Battle - long story short, it's just an amped-down Great Battle. To simplify, it makes sense that the exp is amped-down too.
To an experienced player leveling a new shipline, he will typically want to go into Great Battle, because he understands it more than a player who is barely level 65 on his first BO and can more easily find a way to grab experience there, and that's why Skirmish will usually be less occupied. Going even further, many players will take longer grinding high-level ships, and since they consider the high-level ships (typically too high-level to play in Skirmish) harder to grind they will dedicate more of their time to those ships.
A double exp event for Skirmish may succeed in temporarily causing players to play this room, but all in all when the grinders want their boosts, they'll vote double-exp GB every time.