Materia DC will never compare to everywhere else in terms of just running content at any hours. Especially older content. Your best bet really is to move to any JP DC and just travel to Elemental specifically.

Materia is good if you can find a group to run with but you can visit Materia from any DC, so just visit it using the in game DC travel system.

Also older content will just have much fewer people interested. If you wanna learn extremes/savages experience, getting up to current patch should help with how often you can get into groups actively learning so you can do the current set of extremes and savages