Interesting, thanks.

It seems to me that, in that original design, the JSP servlet acting as a Controller was a multi-use object that would serve many requests?

To me, one of the weirdest things about Rails-style MVC is that a controller is reinstantiated for every request and then promptly thrown away. I'm used to thinking of controllers in desktop apps as rarely-destroyed objects which do a lot of communication with each other.

The Rails-style controller could just be called "RequestHandler" or something like that, IMO.