Actually, I saw this approach with the delegate in one great book "Cocoa and Objective-C Up and Running". Almost in the end of thsi book there is a big project (a photo gallery). All source are there. I think this or a similar example exists on the developer.apple.com. Look for something about Core Data.
I cannot say that I understand your approach from the question, so I can be wrong, but I do not see how it can break MVC. Also I'm not getting mad about all these controllers - if an application have few controls, I will handle them from the app delegate generated by Xcode (3.2.2 and 3.2.3 Xcode add the app delegate when you create new Cocoa project). My projects are for Mac OS.