The weird thing is that, if you look for stylistic differences in super-grandmasters, Fabiano is one of the most combative in tournament play. In any random day, he is far less drawish than Ding himself, or Anish Giri, the commentator earlier in the match. It's not that Fabiano was too passive: It's that the two players in this tournament took unreasonable risks with black.
If you look at the Fabiano/Carlsen matches, what you see is that both players know Carlsen is the better calculator, but that Fabiano is going to have better prep almost every single time. He is one of the best theoreticians alive. So what did he play? Give absolutely nothing Carlsen could grab on to when playing black, yet the scariest possible theoretical openings as white, sometimes still being in-book for 5-10 moves over Carlsen. When Fabi was white, he had plenty of ambition and plenty of chances, but the calculation wasn't quite good enough, as Carlsen's worst moves were never significant, visible blunders.
The Fabiano of that championship would have won this year's championship with relative ease, just because he'd never lose with black, and would capitalize on blunders. The way he played really is the best chance he had.
The wonderful spectacle of a match we just got only comes from two players that, inexplicably, kept trying to win with black, and fail. Good for us, but I suspect that for a top professional it's very hard to understand.
