Having done a similar project this year I completely agree with you. Maybe that's more a statement against Razor than MVC itself - I suspect it's much cleaner/e

Having done a similar project this year I completely agree with you. Maybe that's more a statement against Razor than MVC itself - I suspect it's much cleaner/easier to do a trad MPA+MVC-style app in a language+framework combo that is made for it like Rails. I think the reality is that Razor has been left rotting for a while. It still works, and there's nothing that bad about it but the DX is not good, especially compared to modern JS frameworks. It's hard to explain to people who haven't worked with Razor how annoying things like validation are. There is a "happy path" where the different parts of the validation framework all talk to each other, but it's not obvious and the Razor documentation on MSDN is very _not good_. It doesn't help that there's like 5 completely different things all called "Razor/Blazor" and a lot of semantic overlap between them all. Very frustrating to need to sift through so much to find something that feels like it should be easy and well supported.