I think the problem is MVC itself is a confused mess. It means whatever each person wants it to mean, since it's too easy to make up a bunch of reasonable sounding argumentation for whatever you want to do if you use the words model, view, and controller a lot.
This is the comment I agree with most. Replace a solution defined as a "design pattern" with one defined as a data structure and you get a lot more clarity. The problem MVC solves can be recomposed as "synchronization of concurrent, related, mutable data structures." The relations are definable as a DAG for each direction; the synchronization process with a cyclical graph.
I feel that as with many things in Computer Science, the original MVC-stuff is regrettably "under-read"[1] by a lot people. I highly recommend having a look at the various links on:
for those that haven't read what the original model-view-controller-user idea was all about. It makes more sense from a Smalltalk/Self/Object-C/Message-passing style of object orientation ("true object orientation") than from java -- in this sense it should be a good fit for javascript as well -- but unfortunately java/c++ style object orientation (really "class-inheritance orientation") have bastardized MVC to mean something subtly different (I am not quite sure what, exactly, but I don't think I'm the only one...).
That, coupled with the fact that MVC (the classic, desktop MVC) seems shoehorned in webapps, makes me weary when frameworks tout their MVCness before stating their distinctive features.
BTW, I'm much more adept of removing the controller and going to a tightly coupled stack of view-model with the use of the observer pattern where needed. Controllers remind me of that extra indirection that seems useful in design but is never really used and is thus just unnecessary complexity.
> I think the problem is MVC itself is a confused mess.
I tried to get to the core idea, and I think it is to separate things as much as possible, and minimize interconnections, so as to keep complexity down.
In practice it means to create components (objects) that keep their guts hidden and offer an official "API" to use them.
This might seem far from MVC, but what is the purpose of MVC if not to protect us from the exponential complexity black hole?
