With the new iOS 10 on an older device I would expect:
A) no (or few) new features and the same or adequate performance
B) all new features and poorer performance
What I got was no new useful features and poorer performance and no way to go back or turn off stupid features like, for example, the camera firing up every time I wish to attach a photo to a message....in most cases I intended on sending a picture already on the storage yet the camera has to fire every time regardless wasting battery power. Considering with iOS 10 the camera seems to take much longer to open on some older devices and causes music to stutter in third party apps while doing so, is nothing more than a pain in the ***. All I ask is a setting to disable this feature. This is just an example.
Also my phones and iPad both feel like they have half the ram now with iOS 10. Opening Very simple apps like messages and settings and performing functions are only fast after being repeated once or twice, but something that hasn't been used in a small amount of time has lag as if the entire thing is being launched into the memory as if the device just restarted.
I will say performance within games and apps themselves is the same...just iOS seems to be laggy on a 2-3 year old device every year and if this weren't true there wouldn't be thousands of people complain about it. I have yet to hear a technical explanation as to why the exact same function takes longer with the same hardware on newer iOS versions especially since they have the same graphical interface, and also why there is no way to turn off features we don't want that are clearly taking their toll on older devices. I get that with any platform newer software will always seem a bit slower on older devices but I have used them all and this issue is clearly more prominent with iOS.