According to Peter Jones’ introduction to the Penguin 2003 translation of The Iliad, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, knowledge of Homer lapsed until around 1354, when we can reliably date Petrarch receiving Greek copies of The Iliad and The Odyssey from a Byzantine scholar who had fled west to escape the Ottoman conquests. And yet all this time the West had known of Homer because Roman authors mentioned him constantly. How then did Homer stop being copied or translated into Latin to the point that he was lost to Western Europe for centuries if Roman authors had considered him so noteworthy?
We need to be careful about hyperbole. Alcuin, one of the scholars of Charlemagne’s court in the 9th century, was familiar enough with Homer to use the name as a nickname for his student Angilbert.
At the same time, it’s true that the medievals didn’t appear incredibly interested in Homer’s works. They were, however, highly interested in the Trojan War, in broad strokes. The difference is that the narrative of the Trojan War, as told by Homer, Virgil and the Epic Cycle, was highly reinterpreted by medieval scholars and poets to fit with contemporary values. Depending on who you read from the time, you might see courtly love, Christian piety (as shown by ‘virtuous pagans’), medieval models of kingship or any number of other ideologies/beliefs/practices slathered onto the Trojan War story.
As an aside, if you want visual evidence of this, look at medieval/Renaissance depictions of the Trojan War, the soldiers will almost always be in highly anachronistic, medieval garb (often with halberds).
So why wasn’t Homer important to Latin Medievals? Quite possibly because, as far as they were concerned, he was telling the story entirely wrong. That would make his works less likely to be read, which made them much less likely to be preserved or copied by scribes.