On the other hand I’ve coded the Castle on Rails, which is based on Action Pack. I have no merits here, the credits should go for the original author of Ruby on Rails, which implements an incredible simple design that even my grandma can understand how it works and how to create new controllers and views.
Good design doesn’t need to be hard to use. Best practices should be implemented, then hidden away. Programmers shouldn’t need to remind themselves how clever they are by applying the same complicated pattern over and over again. Extract, abstract, move on!