Well put. Parker was a teenager, and living with the ultimate guilt of all with the murder of Uncle Ben. That, and his aunt's frail health, trying to become the breadwinner of the home and dealing with being bullied, he was trying to handle things many adults do not manage well. The last of his concerns should have been Liz (who was not shy about using Parker to make a violent Flash jealous), or Betty. He was a kid weighed down with adult burdens.

It's a bit telling as to why so many find themselves in love with Peter's Teenage years when most of the media, sans the more recent movies, focus on him as an adult. I think his grief and dealing with said grief was a learned experience that he grew from (While not exactly in Pete's shoes, I can definitely relate in some aspects) and his blossoming into manhood, going to college, winning over MJ, etc, was something that he earned. Nobody gave it to him

Somebody had to do it  . . .

It's not. I can think of a lot of cruder ways to say the same thing .

I was more often than not a somewhat sporadic reader of Spider-Man - apart from the Len Wein/Ross Andru run in the mid-'70s, which I followed pretty regularly - so my impression of MJ might be a little off, but for all her good looks and self-confidence, I never saw her as a super-model type who would consider Peter Parker in any way beneath her level. I thought she was meant to be a kind of bohemian character and her awareness of her own attractiveness was more an aspect of her general lack of inhibition than anything else. I think that's what made her a uniquely attractive member of the Spider-Man supporting cast.

One of these days I'm going to read the entire Spider-Man run up to around the late 1970s, so I'll be curious to see if this impression stands because there are a lot of issues I've missed from the Lee/Romita and Conway/Kane/etc eras, though I've read a fair bit of them.

I think of Sue Storm not so much being smitten with simple physical attraction in the case of a Namor (handsome though he may be), but more the overall dashing figure he cuts. His personality is enormous...and while overwhelmingly arrogant to outright comical levels at times, such a commanding persona backed with no shortage of power (both superhuman and "royal") can heavily attract people sometimes with a sheer charisma that transcends physical looks. He's a man of action, often to a fault, but being larger than life can be quite magnetic.

The prospect of choosing Namor over Reed I think is more of a profound life conflict for Sue...it teases quite literally a whole different life, sacrificing qualities she is also strongly drawn to with Reed in terms of his intellect, maturity, and more "quiet nobility" if you will. Reed is likely who she overall "respects" the most as a man (and of course ultimately chooses with a few bumps in the road at times), but his aloofness and outright unattentiveness sometimes, and much more steady but perhaps teetering on boring character in contrast to Namor cannot be fully ingored by her heart either, especially with Namor's persistent adoration and bold declaration of his devotion.