To address Niko's question, I do tend to agree that a normal form post would be simpler.

I also agree that our view testing story is currently super fuzzy, and I'll try to write up a document describing what I think to be our current best practices for everyone to review fairly soon (maybe tomorrow?).

As far as mocking the HTTP request, after doing a bit of searching on the web, it's not obvious to me how one would do that.

I also tend to agree that over-engineering to accommodate particular unit tests can be a problem.  That said, I'm not convinced that we've got a real problem on our hands here.  I think it'd be more work to turn this into form than it would be worth (eg the maintainability gains would be very minimal).  So, I'm going to just leave this as is.