I must say, I've also become disillusioned with MVC for front-end frameworks, actually after using Mithril [1]. I'm sure you've seen me lurking and asking questions in the repo since before Mithril got big. I used it on a few projects and decided the controller was not an abstraction that made much sense. I looked elsewhere and stumbled upon domchanger [2] but after trying to use it seriously and forking some changes also ran into many impasses. This is what inspired me to develop domvm [3], a simple, pure-js composable vdom view layer for plain models. I took a few of Mithril's good ideas, removed globals, made the magic as opt-in modules (so a bit more wiring is needed) and ended up with something extremely fast (at least 2.5x Mithril), composable and mixed imperative/declarative. It's been a good journey and I'm very happy where everything ended up. Thanks for some inspiration :)