There's a couple reasons why, and I think this is worthy of discussion. I'd definitely like others thoughts on this.
• Rider training is more focused, thus riders tend to be fitter for specific events, and team strategy more focused accordingly.
• Teams are thus stronger than ever, with elite teams often able to have not just a climbing domestique to assist the leader to or near the finish, but several riders able to do so.
• The above can lead to "trains" where teams, and their riders, are strong enough to ride well over 100km like a team time trial, over any terrain, strongly discouraging attacks. This protects the team leaders until the final few km.
• Technology has greatly improved. Riders are fitted with everything from watt meters, HRMs and more, that feed in real time back to the team car. This, coupled with race radios and team radios have neutralized or limited many attacks. Teams are able to almost always know where other riders on the road are to within a few seconds, and use computing power in laptops in cars continually crunching data to estimate just how long any given rider can sustain power output.
• Bikes are overall better, and slightly better maintained than in the past. That doesn't translate into massive gains in power, but it does add up, making a once brutal 200km mountain stage, now just tough. Especially with what's coupled above.
• The days of yonder where a true leader rode at the front as a badge of honor (Merckx, Hinault, etc.) and controlled the pace of the race - and often attacks - while the peloton rolled along at 30-35kph for an hour or so at the start of each stage is long ago forgotten as quaint nostalgia.
• To (hopefully) discourage doping, some GT's have made shorter stages, often in the mountains. While I support this notion, it also has limitations. Thus, races sometimes aren't as hard on the riders as they were years ago. Even if we go back to the late 90's, during a time rife with doping, you would see queen stages in GT's over 7 hours long. Those had the effect of completely fracturing the race, eliminating "trains" and dropping domestiques, often early. Think of it like what we usually see in the World's, or a race like Paris-Roubaix, but during a stage race. Only the elite survive.
• GT organizers, especially the Tour, covet the idea that the race will be close to the final mountain stage or final ITT. This insures, in their mind, people will pay attention to the end. But it often comes at a sacrifice in that we end up with a lot of dull stages over the first few weeks, even "epic" mountain stages, with the only real racing in the last few km.
• There's another notion that riders should be able to ride with near full gas through the third week of any GT, and have something in the tank if need be. In the past it was often accepted that as a GT went into the last mountain stages, riders would be exhausted, and go slower, and that was an okay thing.
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