Did Marquez's inability to take the lead cost him the Norwood/John/Pac fights?

Let me just say that this isn't intended to be a JMM bashing thread, far from it. Anybody who has reached that level of performance is to appreciated, but since even the best fighters have been critiqued I may as well make this thread. Here we go.

Marquez in his prime had 4 blemishes on his official record so we can't say he ducked anybody. But those blemishes were the Norwood loss, the John loss, the Pacquiao I draw and the Pacquiao II loss. In neither of these fights was he comprehensively defeated. Indeed, among his peers of Barrera, Hamed, Morales and Pacquiao, it is Marquez who remains the only one to have never been comprehensively defeated in the ring during his prime. Though he has taken the most losses/draws in his prime among the four.

I thought the Norwood fight was a draw. I thought he beat John by 2 points. And I thought he lost by a point in both the first two Pacquiao fights. Delving too much into any of those fights especially the Pacquiao fights will inevitably stir up massive levels of ****. So with that said, either of those four fights could have gone either way except I really do believe the John fight had some home cooking. But it was not an out and out robbery, far from it.

I noticed in all of those fights Marquez had an inability or unwillingness to take the lead. He was content or perhaps only capable of playing the counter-puncher. Morales provides a stark contrast to that as illustrated when he comprehensively defeated Pacquiao in their first fight. Morales was mostly the counter-puncher in that fight. But he would have those moments is most of the rounds that he won where he really put his stamp on the round. He'd stop Pac in his tracks with a stiff jab or right, you know countering like Marquez did to Pac. Then out of the blue Morales would take the lead and land a hard flush shot and comprehensively win the round. This is something that Marquez would rarely do. It's a big mental impression on judges if you can initiate offense and punish the opponent to mix up your attack. Effective aggression is valued.

In the Norwood fight you had two guys who would sort of stare at each other waiting for the other to make their move. And Marquez just couldn't get comfortable or settled against a guy like that. Same with John. The thing about Marquez is that if you gave him a fighter who made mistakes he punished him unmercifully. You make a mistake and he would eat you alive and he was relentless with that. But against other technicians he always struggled because they weren't as leaky with their approach.

I remember watching Marquez vs Medina from 2003. And Medina was an overmatched guy with no power and Marquez is eating him alive with power counters. He's just obliterating the guy. But even after hurting him or knocking him down Marquez backs off and waits for him to initiate. He'd have a guy with no power, dead to rights and he would allow him to breathe. Medina was actually close to matching Marquez on the compubox, but Marquez was dominating the cards because he was hurting Medina with virtually every flush shot. JMM's reluctance to initiate didn't matter against a guy like Medina who was overmatched, but Marquez's inability to ever really commit to learning how to counter and take the lead like Morales had, continually costed him. Time and time again through his career.