Spring? (Queue discussion on what is and isn't Real MVC(tm))

I will however agree that Rails probably should take most of the responsibility/blame for really bringing MVC to the forefront of web development

Right you are! I didn't realize it had beaten Rails to the punch by a year. But yes, I will stand by my claim that Rails was responsible for popularizing the notion in the wider web development community.

The "wider web development community" was using MVC; Struts and Spring built more websites than Rails did for several years.

You never said anything about web framework before, you said MVC. That's a different discussion. Although we were using MVC in Struts 1 back in what, 2001?