Federico Cargnelutti has made a new post about an alternative Zend Framework developers can user instead of the normal Zend_Controller - his Zf_Controller.

Zend Framework is very flexible and one of its strengths is that it allows developers to implement their own components. The Zend_Controller component, for example, is very powerful. Of course, it's not my intention to replace it, but to offer an alternative that decreases the number of decisions a developer needs to make when developing an application. Meet Zf_Controller.

His controller allows for better backwards compatibility, better performance, removes the need for circular references and drops the need for Singleton classes. He includes an example of the updated directory structure the class would use, a bootstrap comparing with/without the new class and the rest of the scripts needed for a sample application (view, layout, error controller, etc).