I sometimes can't tell if people are joking or stupid. The following quote, for example, has to be a joke:
"The reported mean of 7.7 is misleading because it appears that close to half of your participants are scoring below that mean"
"The reported mean of 7.7 is misleading because it appears that close to half of your participants are scoring below that mean"
1, 2, 3, 4, ..., 98, 1000000, 1000000 then the mean would be 2,004,851 / 100 = 20048.51. In that case, 98% of your sample points fall below the mean.
"It has come to my attention that 40% of your sick days are on Fridays and Mondays. This is unacceptable."
"Ha ha ha! That's a good one. ... Please tell me he was kidding?"
"Welcome to hell, kid."
Yes, arithmetic means are inherently misleading and everyone knows that. They summarize a quantity of information and conceal its important attributes like variance and skew.
The 7.7 figure was probably not being used to deliberately mislead.
The complainer hadn't in fact fact mislead; they had access to other data from the paper on which to base the complaint.
Basically it boils down to "you shouldn't have summarized such and such data using an arithmetic mean because I don't like means; whenever someone uses a mean, they are trying to deceive".
I think the charitable interpretation would be that some conclusion in the paper hinges on the value of the mean, but that conclusion is not valid when you consider that values are more widely distributed, and the reviewer just stated it poorly.