Unfortunately, DnD 4E is a great example of just how wrong the blogger is on his claim that games are shifting towards simpler rulesets and that more complex games are dinosaurs. While DnD 4E was a great simplified rule system, it ultimately was an epic failure for WotC on the financial front and is one of the primary reasons why Pathfinder is so successful.
Please don't spread myths
First off, it was not an "epic failure" financially. It didn't do as well as 3E did, but it did well - in large part because of a massive revenue stream people overlook - the DDI - which alone makes more money every single month than any given sourcebook would (net, not necessarily gross - but net is what matters). So that's a myth.
Second off, the simplification is not why it was less successful - a combination of two factors was, neither of which had ever been the case before:
1) The OGL meant that Pathfinder could exist, legally untroubled, and simply continue the previous edition. This had never happened before. If people could have legally, easily, happily made 1E books when 2E came out, 1E would have survived a lot longer, perhaps indefinitely. Similarly, if 3rd parties had been able to legally, easily continue the 2E line, 3E wouldn't have been nearly as big a hit. Only with the OGL and the so-called "OSR" (which was in large part thanks to the OGL) was Pathfinder viable.
2) Terrible, terrible, awful, insulting marketing which drove players directly into the arms of Pathfinder. Again, no previous edition change had marketing that insulting or dumb, which gave so many people incorrect opinions about 4E, still repeated to this day (not least that it's "like an MMO" - nonsense, if it's like any computer game, it's Final Fantasy Tactics - it's actually most like Earthdawn).
We'll see how well Pathfinder does post-5E D&D. I'm guess it'll do okay for a year or two, then gradually fade out, as Paizo quietly release adventures for 5E (probably dual-statted for Pathfinder and 5E, at least at first), and possibly Paizo sourcebooks for 5E, too (given 5E will have a 3E-like OGL, we hear).
But, meh. People will be people. They'll demand a ruleset that is complicated so they can do everything they can imagine, then complain about the rules being complicated and demand a simple ruleset before refusing to play the simple ruleset because it's too simple.
Truth.
My group moved to playing SR with Fate rules, and our games have lost the "flavor" of SR. It's just a cookie-cutter system in that it attempts to resolve every situation the same way IMO.
It's really a risk with any system change, that you'll lose some of the flavour. I tried going from crunchy to crunchy translating Rifts to GURPS, and still lost most of the flavour, just because the system is so different. FATE is also a really malleable system, as others have said, and unless the DM moulds it right (which takes a lot of work and knowledge!) it won't necessarily give the desired result.
You want to defend the guy? sure go ahead, but just by his comments to other reader's replies which contained such fanciful words such as and I quote (sorry for the bad language it's not mine) "fuck you" It tells me that this is not a honest review of the product but a rant, what is basically what this blog is all about.
That guy posted anonymously and was basically trolling. So the guy responded with hostility. I don't think it was great, but I think the post he was responding to was really dumb and insulting, so... at worst he was equal - and it was his blog, not an open forum.
As for CP2020, it is cleaner - I have sheets for it - statblocks are smaller, the only place it equals SR in messiness is with it's hackers (I can't remember what they're called), and FNFF is about as slow as SR combat - but features more dice-rolling and less obsessively looking up obscure and needlessly complex rules sub-sets. Certainly most players would rather be rolling dice than looking up rules or trying to remember exactly how much their recoil penalty is. It's crunchier than, say, Savage Worlds, but it's short of SR5 by a long shot, especially with Run and Gun, which adds gigantic amounts of crunch (and I'm not talking equipment), most of which is needless.
I will confess; I started out by reading the blog post, continued by skimming it, then pretty much jumped straight to the end and saw no real conclusion. Why? Well, because the guy is complaining about a game that is intrinsically not a fluff piece. Is SR fairly rules-heavy? In my opinion, only moderately so - I actually personally dislike 4e and 5e, because they dumbed the damn thing down. I play Shadowrun because I want to be able to spend 80k on a motorcycle that squeezes every bit of accel and decel out of the technology - then makes every bit that I've squeezed out squeal like a pig because I'm abusing it. I play Shadowrun because I want to know that you can't hit with a spell what you can't see, or that you can hit with a spell what you can see - because x100 binoculars and a high tower are a mage's best friend. I want the granularity that 3e offered, the decision between a methane-driven engine and a high-output electric motor, as well as all the other odd little things. Shadowrun has weird corners, and odd rules.
I get where you're coming from here, but the problem isn't the gear rules.
The problem is the rules-rules. Gear rules which distinguish between an electric and a methane engine are fine - they'll rarely come up and it's okay to reference them.
The big problems SR has are with needlessly complex rules-rules, which DON'T add much real granularity or interest, but do add a big overhead in terms of numbers you need to remember and reference. SR has particular problems here because it doesn't control how players interact with these rules - it's easy for a player to accidentally create a character which interacts with a lot of complex rules, or to be forced into doing so because of the archetype he's interested in. The point with the treading water rules is that they are needless complex, not that they exist. They could be more simple, and achieve the same or better result.
Put it another way - SR has complexity in the wrong places, and even when it's in the right places. Dead Man's Trigger and Recoil are good examples - Dead Man's Trigger should not be that complex - it should be "If you blow your Edge you get to take one last action, but no movement", end of story. Recoil is a very tedious system to track which just doesn't matter to a lot of characters.
This is the problem SR has - it's all in the subsystems. The basic rules are not needlessly complex. They feature a lot of rolling, but they're elegant, memorable, and work. But the subsystems? Ugggggh. That's where SR falls to pieces. They're complicated, they're badly written (the Rigger chapter, for example is a disaster, and many questions about how Riggers and Drones work remain unanswered), and they slow the game down to a crawl.
Also, what game IS a "fluff piece"? There's no such thing. A "fluff piece" is a little piece in a newspaper written solely to boost or praise someone. That doesn't apply to games, at all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery