How did MVC get so F’ed up?

The Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern has been misunderstood and misimplemented over the years. The original Smalltalk MVC design keeps models completely unaware of views and controllers, using observer patterns for communication. Modern implementations, particularly Apple's Cocoa version, have corrupted this by making controllers act as intermediaries and creating tightly coupled view-controllers. True MVC requires observable models that can notify multiple views of changes, with the key insight being that models should never depend on their UI components. The pattern works as a composite where views can have their own models, and even function arguments should be treated as observable models to properly enable/disable UI elements.