I know that there was an aura of anti-skeuomorphism floating around for a while there while everyone was excited about an iOS redesign, but iOS 7 really made me realize how much skeuomorphism was a good thing in iOS. It made the phone feel like home and made it feel familiar. You open any app and you immediately knew how to use it. It was an empowering feeling when I first used iOS for the first time (with the first iPod touch), the feeling of just *knowing* how to do everything.
5+ years later of using it and a redesign comes out and I've never been more confused and annoyed. Who seriously thought that white backgrounds and thin text was a good design and a good replacement for the familiarity that skeuomorphism offered? Forstall may have let the popularity get to his head (from what I heard) but ousting him was a huge mistake and totally undeserved. Apple lost the one person in the company with the most experience with iPhone UI and replaced him with somebody who hasn't touched software in his life, and the results show it. Ive is a master of hardware design but he has no idea what he's doing with software design, and iOS7 may look pretty on paper but usability has suffered badly. Say what you want about skeuomorphism, but it was just better than what we have now. For me, I'm just sad that a brilliant company like Apple allowed 6 years of engineering go to waste and be replaced by, frankly, amateur-hour-grade software design and programming.