I think DeusXM was trying to inject a note of optimism and a can-do attitude to cheer everyone up.
It's about hope.
Cards on the table; I've my own complications from T1 after 15 years with it - so far, only background retinopathy. Do I beat myself up over the fact that this has happened to me? No. Do I think I could have done more to stop it? Yes - deep down I know that. And that gives me strength, because it means I can do more to stop things getting any worse. There seems to be some confusion here between saying 'good control can and does prevent complications' with 'good control is easy to achieve'.
I wholeheartedly believe that with near perfect control, there's no biological reason for complications. I also believe that near perfect control is almost an impossibility with the tools we have. But that's not a reason to give up. Yes, we can all say that better control could maybe have prevented this or that, but no-one's going to hold that against anyone else because getting that good control is not easy. Blaming people for their complications would be like blaming someone for failing to climb Mount Everest on the basis that they're able to walk.
I guess I'm just not prepared to accept complications as an inevitability regardless of what I do, and every time I read about some horrible complication that could happen, I don't get depressed; I just think "there's another good reason to keep on fighting." All those depressing stats - not one of them matters. The only thing that matters is how we are.
Rather than get depressed at the thought a child diagnosed with T1 today is statistically likely to have a longer life expectancy than me, I would just look at that as a personal challenge to prove the stats wrong. I don't know about you, but I draw far more support from forums in that they connect me with people like Richard Vaughn, who've had diabetes for longer than most people could expect to live full stop. Maybe they're lucky. But it'd be nice to give it a go.
I expect this thought will offend people too (and I'm really trying not to, I've lost people to cancer), but once you have cancer, there is little you can physically do on your own to get yourself better except keep the faith that you will get through it. We get so much more - there are simple things we can do every day to improve our health and improve our prognosis. Knowing what could go wrong should inspire us to keep on doing the right things, rather than weighing us down. Shouldn't we look on our ability to influence our condition as a great positive?
The fact remains that every single one of us with T1 should be dead by now. But we're not. We're all still here. We've already taken on the big battle and we're winning. Every day is a gift, and no-one should get worried about what the stats say about how many of those gifts we get.