well,
You say you're against processed sugars (or refined sugars), but a few lines up you're recommending "Goo" for athletes, every single sports brand or your Goo or pre-workouts are refined sugars. Same with the drinks you used for your daughter, those are all refined sugars.
Ensure is water with sugar and low quality protein, anyone can make ensure, and it's refined sugar. The reason I don't like Ensure has more to do with the fact this stuff is promoted as a medical drink even though it's pure garbage, if anything will give you a heart attack it's going to be ensure, tons of vitamins thrown together and so much sugar in one drink that I don't know how they can even sell this, that's why glycemic load is relevant, Ensure would have very high glycemic load which is far unhealthier than simple sugars itself (or refined if you will).
You say you want good quality carbs, that doesn't mean much to me, when all said and done, a carb is a carb, it's all blood glucose, and if a carb raises glucose levels fast or not is highly dependent on a lot of things. Complex carbs can raise blood sugar faster than soda pop or eating sucralose or dextro or glucose. Go look at the glycemic index, you'll find complex carbs on that list there raising insulin much higher than refined sugar, it also depends on the glycemic load, the total amount of sugar you're taking and it depends on what you're eating.
Dunno what atheletes you're talking about, but I know no athlete who tries to get energy out of complex carbs for any event, the only way to get the most amount of energy out of a sugar is to use monosaccharides in the form of dextro or glucose, since they're easy to extract from a food source (and look up any sports brand, I challenge you to find one without either glucose, fructose or dextro). It's not that simple to say that complex carbs will give a steady stream of energy, many complex carbs have a much higher glycemic index than simple carbs, it depends on a lot of factors.
(I do believe that's a good argument for proteins, certain proteins digest much faster and others deliver a stream of protein content, and it's purely down to the type of protein, the ones with smaller amino acid chains vs ones with long chains, but for sugar this isn't true, the digestion rate is not as simple as Simple VS complex, it depends on glycemic load and metabolism)
I'm mostly tired of people who say carb x is bad carb y is not (the fact people think processed sugar or fructose is inherently bad is because the media has been pushing this story for years, complex carbs are the same damn thing after your intestine processed them, they're both blood glucose, the only reason this story is being pushed is because it's far easier to consume 100 soda cans than it is to eat 100 buckets of rice, and when someone is overweight, it's going to be because of the soda cans, not the rice, but that doesn't mean refined sugar is bad), at the end of the day ALL is blood glucose, and a complex carb vs simple carb or the glycemic index, is a lot less important than glycemic load and prior digestion influencing bloog glucose and thereby insulin. And if you can use sugar that is already processed, why in the world would you spend your time trying to get your energy from complex carbs.
I do agree with you when you say you want a complete meal and food with complex carbs tend to have other benefits than just raising glucose, but I think that's not a strong enough argument to rail against refined sugar. There are plenty of good ways to get adequate nutrition outside of using complex carbs.