Many people accept the MVC dogma as the word of god. In truth, it is a design trade-off just like anything else. You should really look at SeaSide or UncommonWeb. In SeaSide the view and controller are combined into a component in the way you describe as intuitive. In Rails best practice is to create partials (partial views) that can be re-used across views, put code into the model instead of the controller, and use before_filter to trigger re-usable functions.
