I agree, it's massively arrogant to think your platform of choice was a real game changer because of your ignorance as to what other people were already doing.
I'd be interested on which MVC framework you feel in the web community changed the whole conversation on how to develop web applications before Rails became popular. Maybe you could school us on this alternate history?
Personally, I have a different recollection. I seem to remember the PHP MVC frameworks and ASP.Net MVC and and whatever the hell Java people use all came out because Rails and Django became popular. I do remember Django helped but as an outsider to the two frameworks I seemed to get the feeling Rails was clearly the thought leader.
The Java ecosystem had MVC a long time before .NET and a long time before rails mvc was even conceived. You seem to be missing a chunk of history.
Rails made MVC popular among lesser developers (bottom feeders, small projects, not much money - this may have changed now). A lot of organisations were using MVC as an enterprise design pattern a long time ago.
I think smalltalk devs were using the MVC pattern in the 80's and it's been in various Java enterprise stacks for a very very long time. It seems that everyone else caught up when being a low paid front end 'developer' became cool in the USA.
"Controller Model View Controller (MVC) is one of the most quoted (and most misquoted) patterns around. It started as a framework developed by Trygve Reenskaug for the Smalltalk platform in the late 1970s. Since then it has played an influential role in most UI frameworks and in the thinking about UI design."
