Is this where RIBs came from? My company adopted that and ran into smaller versions of all the same problems. We moved on to something leaner after a couple of months. Lots of interesting ideas in RIBs though.
On top of the discussed complexity and featuritis, I suspect over-engineering, NIH syndrom and "architecture" must have played a role. Misunderstanding, misapplying and blaming MVC to end up with twice the code in 3 or more times more classes.