If the reviewer was accurate and his review's prose suggested competence and fairness, chaosium took its perfectly good rules system and basically fuckified it severely.
It seems a lot of changes complicated, adding dice pools or eliminating the simple resistance table. Others seem fair, like allowing players to push some rolls, or keeping POW from being the most vital stat.
But in general the changes seem to have fucked up a perfectly good system.
Can you link to the review, Battlemaster? I've been playing Call of Cthulhu since the first edition, and I switched over the 7e for the last campaign I played in (we ran through Masks of Nyarlathotep). In general, there were a lot of 7e changes that seemed more like change for change's sake. However, I didn't think it was overall more complicated or any more fucked up than previous editions. I like the system overall both earlier editions and 7th edition, but still have a bunch of gripes with it.
Speaking of new editions broadly, unfortunately, there is a company profit bias to put out a new edition just to get players to buy the core rulebook over again. 7th is annoying in that the previous editions were extremely minor such that you could easily play with the new edition and not notice any change. 7th edition is compatible - so it is still easy to use material for older editions, but there was just enough cosmetic changes that it motivates players to buy it.
About new editions broadly, the best reason for a new edition is that player feedback and new material in the game has suggested a bunch of improvements. While I disliked the politics of it, I thought in terms of rules, D&D 2nd edition was well handled, though for me the best example is Hero System 4th edition which was excellently handled. They cleaned up a lot of the cruft and incorporated new material published.
Still, the frequent bias is to go for the profit of getting the player base to buy the core book again, which carries with it the bias of aiming the game most at the die-hard players rather than newbies. Hence a lot of new editions get more and more complicated.