I remember there was an article about climbing Everest that was pretty high up on HN for a few days. It makes a lot of sense that it was popular now that I think about it since there's plenty of startup analogies to climbing Everest. Fall asleep because you need to "take a break" and you might never wake up. Just one of many interesting parallels.
The easier way to explain it is that Rails is not true MVC (true being defined by the original intention as described by Trygve Reenskaug for Smalltalk). True MVC is an architectural pattern based on the composite and observer patterns and is designed for synchronous apps. This is why Cocoa or Sproutcore are more like true MVC.
Rails is Model2, which is the web adapted version of MVC that is popular in server-side web dev.
Django does a good job of being realistic about what it is doing:
"If you’re hungry for acronyms, you might say that Django is a “MTV” framework – that is, “model”, “template”, and “view.” That breakdown makes much more sense." - http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/faq/general/
The article also doesn't mention that MVC is also traditionally used to implement asynchronous UIs, which the web is not suitable for (e.g. there is no push mechanism for the model to update the views. Instead views must use AJAX to poll for updates to model.)
"G1 = A gateway that translates between XMPP and the protocol(s) used on a foreign (non-XMPP) messaging network"
I don't think my question was not vague at all. It just might be out of the ordinary. Most people are interested in XMPP client implementations. I want a pre-existing open-source project that would be a good first step towards building an XMPP gateway.