I share those concerns & agree that MVC is a lot to swallow in an introductory workshop. But it's also very motivating! A lot of people want to build real websites instead of toy programs. We're trying to harness that awesome source of motivation & it seems to be working despite the drawbacks.
Yeah, it's a difficult line to walk between teaching what is comprehensible and enabling people, with magic, to do something concrete, even if they know nothing about how anything works. The former bores people because it's too abstract, and the latter...well, I feel there's the risk that when there's too much magic involved, the students feel as if being a "wizard" is an inherent trait, rather than something you eventually build towards after plugging away at the fundamentals.
I've toyed with teaching a workshop that entails: teach enough programming to turn a non-flat-file dataset (maybe a json of their tweets) into a decent visualization (by plugging into Google Charts, perhaps) and uploading a static page, with Twitter Bootstrap, onto a free hosting service, or even a blog service such as Wordpress.
But even that is a lot to teach in a day:
1. Command line and file system basics
2. Fundamentals of programming (enough to open a JSON file, parse and aggregate it on some conditions, and spit out HTML)
3. Basic HTML and DOM, including what you need to know to
4. Basic webserver/uploading stuff
Most workshops struggle with getting 3 and 4 done. #2 is not easily achievable over even several days.
