I mean these have been 2 absolutely abysmal weeks of GT racing, there is just no way around that. And of course the organizers were extremely unlucky with Remco's and Tao's abandonments but frankly I still think this wouldn't be anywhere near as big of a topic if they had just designed a better route.
Every time nothing happens for the first two weeks of a giro (and let's be honest, that's quite a regular occurence) people predicted this to happen the second the route was announced. We always tend to get blinded by the potential of some crazy mountain stages not paying attention to their placement and what the gc situation might be before them. The Crans Montana stage was always completely relying on big gaps in the gc and considering how the route up to that point looked it was really completely relying on Remco destroying the TT's. That didn't work out so the stage was never going to deliver.
Right now if you think you are the strongest you might as well wait for stages 19 and 20 and if you aren't the strongest you are happy to stay close in the gc as long as everyone lets you.
@Red Rick wrote it in todays stage thread, that sadly all the gc contenders have so far ridden completely rationally. But if you make a route where for two weeks that's the answer to "Why is nobody attacking" then I'm sorry, you didn't make a good enough route.
I don't want to write another essay on what to do differently. The problems are so obvious anyway. Routes are backloaded, they don't use the Apennine Mountains, they don't use the absurdly large potential to make medium mountain stages, they always get the order of stages wrong and really often the stage designs just suck. Why go into more detail when everyone could make a better route with a bit of effort. But that's exactly the problem. The lack of effort. Creating a good race is just not a priority and so we get this. Don't complain about the riders, don't say it's an excuse who crashed out. Those things might be true but they mostly hide the fact that these first two weeks have simply been a disasterclass in race design.