Just now seeing this post. I'll jump in and be controversial and say with the right control structures and design, Models are entirely unnecessary. You can perform interesting computations, optimizations, rendering tricks without needing Models at all.

I would argue that MVC will only bury your application in complexity - even with a really great design and code base. Your example has shown just how stateful MVC really is. And statefulness, in my experience at least, introduces complexity - particularly when trying to perform interesting computations, optimizations, or rendering tricks.

(¬M)VC, PVC are both too conservative. I prefer (¬Model)-View-Collection.