I personally think .NET is much worse than any of the more common web languages (even PHP or Perl) for the web. If I were writing a Windows application then I'd probably write it in .NET using Visual Studio, but not a web application.
As I said in my original comment "Different strokes.", you may like .NET. That's fine. It might be the right choice for you and the wrong one for me. I was more commenting that it was amazing to me that someone would think it was awesome because it sounds like the complete opposite to me.
I guess I should have asked what you find compelling about writing web applications in .NET.
I have issues with Microsoft's MVC (mostly that there is no official way of splitting it across several solutions and keeping working routing) but I've never found it overkill for enterprise-style webapp development.
We used MVC/Entity Framework. It works well as a RAD for the backend with full HTML/CSS/JS for the front end that we can get creative with. Reminds me a lot of Java development.
The MVC model itself is not overkill, sorry that sentence was not clear. I should know better than make contentious comments on HN that are going to spawn a bunch of aggressive responses when I'm trying to start my day.
You have not given any solid technical reason as to why ASP.NET is a bad framework. In my experiences, it's more or less as capable as Ruby on Rails, Clojure, Java, etc. You've stated it's overkill, meaning what exactly? Are you even aware of the changes being made to ASP.NET vNext? The dotnet cli tool? The only complaint you seem to have is that the tight coupling of ASP.NET to various Windows platforms is a little much for people who are used to Go or RoR.
But, you don't have to use mvc; there's Nancy or low-level Owin. So why do people complain about MVC when there are other choices? Certainly not like in other platforms, but at least few good ones exists! Why judge whole platform because of one fx?
Similar like EF or Nhibernate. They are big and heavy and very slow if not used properly, but also there's Dapper, massive or simpleData.
As far as being an "influencer"; do you see any links on my profile? Again, that's something other people find appealing, not me.