If you were to ask veteran players how much of a part 3rd party tools plays in their overall eve experience what answer would you hear back. Probably anywhere from 20% to 40%.
So for new players, not having easy access to 20-40% of the total gameplay experience is of course going to make a lot of them leave.
We can’t make anyone stay that doesn’t like the core gameplay of eve but those people that we really WANT to stay are people who actually like the core but leave based on other factors. Like, they got annoyed at the fitting tool, they didn’t find a cool corp to join because the corp finding UI is terrible, they didn’t find a good way of interacting with people in the Chat or any other number of things that need improvement.
I actually made a separate post on this topic of improving the social media/chat aspects of this game. So I hope you read that 