There's three keys to that game - trashing to get rid of coppers and estates, +buy, and attacking pressure with margrave/defending from that. His starting buys - potion/blackmarket just don't help with that at all. If he had gone silver-steward, or steward-watchtower, he could have gotten a margrave in response as early as turn 4, (and gotten another $5 card in turn 5), he could have acquired hamlets and trashed coppers and done actually useful things in the meantime. I would have had a grand total of 1 margrave use more than him, and for that margrave I only bought a potion anyway. If he bought the right things, by turn 5 our decks could have been completely identical. (My buy phase monies for the first 5 turns were 2,5,3,4,3. His were 3,4,4,3-5 depending on card choice, 5) Heck, he could have capitalised on his chance to open steward and trashed two more cards than me.
Instead, he did a course of action that began with a bad opening, continued with a silver buy that was useless for peddler acquisition, and ended with him actually buying none of the hamlets and margraves that he complained about me getting. Instead he gets a laboratory and a crossroad for his deck with one terminal in it, and never picks up a trasher or a +buy. There's one thing blaming bad luck if you tried your best and fought for it, and quite another when you did things that were quite simply actively horrible.