I was having this same kind problem - getting my players to actually use the gods I made up - but I implemented a few major changes compared to how most people tend to use gods/pantheons and it seems to be really helping.

1. I got rid of the names. It is much easier to identify which is the god of death and which is the god of war, when you call them by those labels rather than literal names. Now I also couched this in saying that they have a lot of names, and then having religious experts or scholars call them by different names throughout history - but for the players it is "yep, that's the god of peace".

2. Very clearly tying/connecting the gods to their alignments. Essentially, it's a slightly meta explanation that the alignments are the way they are because of the gods. For example, my god of cities is LN, she's also the god of coin and generally of civilization; all because that's what me and my players think of when we think LN. This eliminates them asking if the god of freedom is something other than CG (paladin of freedom reference).

3. Unless you're a cleric, and even then its not as myopic as it used to be, you don't think of the gods individually - you think of them as a group. You don't pray to a single god, the temple isn't to a single god, clerics don't wear holy symbols of single gods. It is all the pantheon. Part of this is due to having a hierarchy of the gods, with a king of the pantheon like the traditional real world ones. But when you revere the Norse Pantheon, you revere the whole thing, not just Odin. You recognize that Hel is part of that pantheon as well, that she has a role to play.

4. Druids aren't vaguely shamanic and focused solely on nature as their god - they are tied into all elements of nature, including how the gods play into it. Thus, they're a nature-cleric and revere the whole pantheon as well. They recognize the bounty, the spring comes with the good goddess and wife of the king (who is NG), and they recognize the harvest, the fall/winter which comes via death of the god of death (NE). They shy away from the cities and wars and constructs of men, explaining why they avoid the corners.

And all together this shift has really helped me to explain the gods and their motivations and for my players to actually use the gods more in their daily adventures - like saying a quick prayer to an evil goddess so she doesn't spring any traps when they go dungeon delving, that sort of thing. And then when I choose to lay on the lore, to explain how it matters I can do that, but it isn't starting with a blank canvass.