what am i missing?

[eluser]cityzen[/eluser]
I've read the user guide, read the PACKT book, looked at a lot of examples and I'm still just scratching my head. Is there anything worth reading about variables between controllers and views. I'm sure I'm missing something but I don't even know where to look at this point. Is it really that hard to manage variables in these MVC frameworks? It seems like simple tasks are so convoluted that I'm spending hours just trying to understand exactly what is going on. It just seems like the only way I can stay away from errors is putting code like $data['name'] = ''; all over the place if I'm using the variable $name in my view. I have to pass it in when I add, save, edit, etc.

I don't consider myself dumb when it comes to this, but this seems so illogical that I'm having a hard time making sense of any of it.

Thanks in advance for any advice/tips.