I think there may be a misunderstanding there. The community has built a ton of third party tools ( https://github.com/screepers ) and even has it's own alliance tracking site ( http://www.leagueofautomatednations.com/ ). I can't imagine anyone just using the ingame tools.
Can confirm, the community tools are awesome. If someone is only playing using ingame, without any of the external stuff, I feel they are missing a large portion of the game.