Visual Studio is overkill for web development IMHO (and again, different strokes. I know some people like to write PHP in Eclipse.)
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.
Making contentious comments is fine, the problem is you have to back them up with anything solid. The basis of your argument is that Visual Studio is overkill for writing web applications. That has nothing to do with ASP.NET and more to do with the desire for simpler developer environment. This can be solved by using VSCode, or setting up Omnisharp for the various text editors out there.
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.
You still have not provided any specific reasons for "why" you believe Visual Studio/.NET is overkill for web development. I would like to actually know because I am curious.
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.