Here's the solution I finally found. I setup the tabs and div's like this:
And then I populate them once like this:
I hear what you're saying, though, about complexity. Eventually, this thing will have 6 or 7 tabs with a fair amount of UI components. If I put it all in one view, that will be a big pile of code. Breaking each tab out into it's own view will make things more modular, but then there's the added complexity of managing those multiple views (now where did I put that code?) So I just don't know. I could probably just put a call to each view (which in effect makes them partial views) in the div that defines each tab, and that would remove the ajax load functions. Hmmm...
Anyway, thanks for your assistance.