^The innovative new material on the VIIs was plastic...
I'm pretty confident that flyknit will be just fine, and like it's been said before multiple times, the upper is obviously not going to be completely made out of flyknit, will most likely have hyperfuse and additional support for the areas that need it. Have any of you guys held or checked out the Flyknit Frees in hand? It's a flyknit upper but much more densely packed/woven than the racers/trainers. If you're basing your opinion of flyknit solely off of the racers for example, which is extremely minimal, it definitely won't be like that on the Kobes.
That said, with all the new upper materials they've been throwing at us the last 5 years or however long it's been from plastic flywire uppers to hyperfuse to EM, etc etc, I honestly kind of just miss an old school leather upper, at least for playing ball in. The plastics can be hit (IV-VI) or miss (VII, IMO) depending on how stiff they make it, and while I did and do like EM on the 8s, I actually wish it was a little bit stiffer of an upper for playing ball. I honestly hate the concept/marketing of the Elite series, but I do think that's something they did right with the Elite 8s by having double layered EM. I think what I miss about leather is just that I more or less always knew what I was getting with it, even if I don't miss the lack of ventilation on some of the older leather models.
Either way, we'll see in a couple months...