I myself am a ASP.NET MVC developer by day, and play with Node.JS by night. I agree with you on the difficulty in moving outside the .NET world, but I will say ASP.NET MVC isn't nearly as bad as webforms. Webforms abstracts so much of how the web works away that that it's extremely difficult to wrap your head around anything else. And like you said, because the abstraction is so deep, it's very difficult to make room in your mind for anything BUT webforms. With ASP.NET MVC, I've found very little difference. The majority of the coding for most modern CRUD apps is on the client-side anyway, so the majority if your knowledge is transferable to Node.js. Express and ASP.NET MVC both follow a restful model, and I already had experience working with closures, async calls,from client-side javascript, so I haven't found the conversion to be very difficult at all.
Ah, okay. I moved away from .Net just after ASP.Net MVC was released, so I didn't get a chance to see what impact it would have on the community.
The reception to ASP.Net MVC, though, confirmed my original point about the .Net community. I heard lots of talk treating the MVC pattern as revolutionary, when, in fact it was something that was rather common outside of the .Net community.
It wasn't even the first .Net MVC implementation, Castle Monorail has been around since late 2005.. 3 or 4 years before the first version of ASP.Net MVC.
But it takes the Microsoft stamp to get a lot of these people excited.
