So, at the end of the day, there are a lot of lessons that are taken as implicit in the world of Ember.js. However, much like everything else in Ember, these items aren't so easily understood.
This is an important lesson that I keep forgetting. Controllers are NOT like controllers in a Server-side MVC. Controllers are NOT like the Collections that you find in Backbone.js. They are something that presents the model to the view. That's it. For example, given the following configuration snippet:
App.Router = Em.Router.map ->
@resource 'root', { path: '/' }, ->
@route 'create'