It was the 90s.
(Not OPs story, but WebObjects availability)
I worked with .NET as well around the same time, and in my opinion it never quite achieved the same level of integration as WebObjects.
It also had quite a high price-of-entry until Visual Studio Express editions were released in 2005.
I don't have any experience with modern .NET/MVC specifically but modern approaches in general shy away from the decisions that made WebObjects so good because they do tend to hit nasty scalability limits.
How is that different then .Net?