Agreed, with reservations. iPhone 4 itself was a grossly mis-executed product, though it wasn't obvious at the time.
The core issue is that the iPhone 4's CPU and GPU performance are only marginally better than the 3GS it replaced, but it pushes 4x the number of pixels around.
At the time we weren't really pushing the performance envelope, so everything appeared fine. Now we are - it's trivially easy to hit the upper bound of iPhone 4's performance envelope, whereas the 4S (and the 5, 5S) have a lot more wiggle room.
More critically for app and OS developers, the GPU performance on iPhone 4 was woefully inadequate for the number of pixels it's tasked to render. IIRC the iPhone 4's GPU has a fillrate (i.e., max pixels rendered per second) that's about 13% higher than the total number of pixels it has. This is to say, if you draw even a trivial amount of stuff in the background, you're going to start dropping frames.
For the 4S, 5, and 5S, the lack of CPU performance can often be made up by moving things to the GPU judiciously. On the 4 we don't even have that.
Here's where I disagree:
> "There is no good reason for iOS 7 to be slower than iOS 6. The "it requires more processing power for animations" reason is bogus"
Of course it is, but no one stated that the slowness is due to animations. A large part of the slowness comes from the "blur everything!" design of iOS7, which is inherently GPU-heavy, and thus performs very poorly on the iPhone 4 and its shittastic GPU.
The blur is everywhere, even (especially?) the stock apps where every tool bar and navigation bar blurs items behind itself. You may want to try turning the blur off: http://www.redmondpie.com/how-to-turn-off-ios-7-blur-effects...
This really has little to do with optimization - iOS is on the whole a pretty performant OS and platform. This has everything to do with Apple deciding to include features that are beyond the performance envelope of a targeted device (or conversely, failing to drop support for a device when features move past its performance envelope).