Q:

Why does the Angular JS Route require you to cite a controller?

Why does the Angular JS Route require you to cite a controller?
Coulnd't you just cite a view and then have the view directive link to to the controller?

A:

Why does the Angular JS Route require you to cite a controller?

route does not require a controller to be specified.  If you omit the controller it will just load the specified page but you will have limited functionality.

Coulnd't you just cite a view and then have the view directive link to
to the controller?

No.  This is not what directives are for.  Quoting from the docs for directives:

What are Directives?
At a high level, directives are markers on a DOM element (such as an
attribute, element name, or CSS class) that tell AngularJS's HTML
compiler ($compile) to attach a specified behavior to that DOM element
or even transform the DOM element and its children.

...and the docs for controllers:

Understanding Controllers
In Angular, a Controller is a JavaScript
constructor function that is used to augment the Angular Scope.
When a Controller is attached to the DOM via the ng-controller
directive, Angular will instantiate a new Controller object, using the
specified Controller's constructor function. A new child scope will be
available as an injectable parameter to the Controller's constructor
function as $scope.
Use Controllers to:

Set up the initial state of the $scope object.
Add behavior to the $scope object.

