Hey
@Ace Rimmer - welcome to the forum...
The good news then is that an HbA1c of 49 really isn't that high (mine was 155 when I was first diagnosed) - so small changes now may be all you need.
The bad news is pretty much as your first post suggests. For lots of well-meaning reasons, the advice you are often given seems to include lots of sugars, which just seems wrong.
24 years of service should put you in a place of having discipline that most of us will only dream of.
It sounds like you are well familiar with the "calories in - calories out" routine. It's a dogma that doesn't really stand up to inspection - if it was the military, it would have been scrapped decades ago, simply because it so often fails. That isn't opinion, just statistics.
However - in all the medical texts - you can read for yourself that the world and his dog knows what we used to believe - that sugars and starches are fattening. This is what drives insulin up, and that's what drives insulin resistance, and that's what drives up blood glucose (when your ability to cope with the need for more insulin starts to lose the battle, to keep stretching the metaphor).
So - for someone just diagnosed with the hormone imbalance known as type 2 diabetes, the simplest way to think about it (or was for me) is "lets get that insulin back in balance" - how do you do that? reduce the sugars and starches. You may find that you don't need to do much more than that.. though be prepared to be surprised at how much sugar and starch is hidden in food...
If you can do that, you may be surprised to know that adding fat back to your plate can actually be good for you - but one step at a time...