In fact, I think FD, just like a lot of us, have become dependent on the existence of these tools too. It takes the pressure off of them to supply this sort of thing in-game. So it really is in their interest to engage with the 3rd party community. It would take a lot less effort on their part than having to put all this stuff in the game itself.
The unvarnished truth, right there.
All of the effort put in by 3rd party devs has directly reduced FD's cost base. The third-party tooling should be included in-game. Groups, guilds, inventories, blueprint management, build management, route histories - all of these things are made usable by 3rd party tooling.
Almost NONE of Season 2 would be manageable without some sort of 3rd party tool, be it Inara, EDDB, Microsoft Excel, or even Office World. Materials, engineers, the Alien Ruins, all depended upon out-of-game communications that are underpinned by commanders running EDMC (or some equivalent) and entering data into sites manually.
What I don't understand is why FD deleted the data it did from the API. There has been no response on the bug report thread beyond the holding reply "we're looking into it". We are left wondering whether it was a spiteful move to annoy players, or whether is was a giant SNAFU by one or more of the dev team. Either way, FD's lack of response on the matter demonstrates that there is an aspect of this to which the company does not wish to admit.
! Might consider not logging in at all as long as its down.
