Well, FW/1 was a good read, but as odd as it sounds, everything was making sense until they got to the point about views and layouts.
I have not been able to determine what the difference between them is, as both contains output, but layouts invokes some kind of cascading capture and insert process (a possible convention the FW uses)
I can see how they actually pass in the FW's variables scope into the controller's init() function so that it has a variables.fw which points to that location, giving the controller access to the methods and data in the FW's variables scope. That seems to be the cornerstone of sharing the data across the application.