Thanks to Eventide tech support – the mystery has been solved!!  

Turns out there’s a problem with the inserts that are in the plastic knobs of the Reverb 2016. To test I pulled out the plastic knobs (quite easy) and then I did a simple push on each metal encoder and it showed the current value of each parameter, and also pushing and turning worked fine on the EQ and Predelay parameters. So Eventide tech support promised to send me new plastic knobs (yay!!).

Very happy that I get to keep my Reverb 2016 (it is awesome, sounds like magic).