How is that light weight? let's see it has scripts for skeloton projects/models/etc, has it's own orm's, and even ships with its own package manager. that seems like a lot of stuff is you're looking to light weight.
The M in MVC has nothing to do with database persistence. That is a wonderful perception that rails and its ilk have given us, for better or worse. You could build a complete system that fully implements MVC without database persistence, or really any persistence at all.
Even if you are using the Rails version of the term MVC, as one commenter was keen to point out, it still has nothing to do with having data persistence or not.
