Hamilton is used to playing it safe and conservative and that cost him this year, all these years he has had a car that you can drive comfortably at 8/10 that doesn't force you to make mistakes or be aggressive and still easily beat everybody else going 10/10, but that doesn't work this year when you have a young gun fighting his way up in a car with comparable performance now.

So when this season the FIA took to a more "let them race" interpretation of the rules, to the rejoice of the fans (we have been asking that for years), Max's strategy was the right one to take, and Hamilton's playing it safe was the loosing one.

That is why FIAs rulings may have favored Max more, because he pushed the limits more, not because the FIA wanted to favor him, Hamilton could have taken advantage of them just as much as Max did, like he did at Silverstone pushing Max against the barriers at 200kph/50Gs and still got the 25 points regardless , but he has grown conservative these years because of his dominant car in previous years and played it safe, and cost him the championship. If Hamilton was the one he was in his first 2 years of F1, he would of given Max a run for his money at his own strategy for sure and. probably would of won.

In the end the marginally more deserving of the two won the driver's championship (it was close), and the most deserving team won the constructors championship. But let's not loose sight of the fact that F1 is just a constructors championship, the driver's championship is just for show, because driver skill matters little in the result compared to the car the driver is driving and cumulative luck from race incidents like crashes or pace cars. So who wins it is not that big  deal.

Everybody will learn from this season and next season will be interesting, let's just hope there is more than two drivers that have a chance for the fight for the championship next year.