Flight aware versus American Airlines customer service

My husband and daughter were traveling today on AA. They got a notification from AA that the flight was delayed. I looked on flight aware and there was a time discrepancy, flight aware showed the flight was several hours delayed, and American Airlines said it was just a 40 min delay. I could also see the inbound flight was also majorly delayed too. With this info my husband was not in a rush to get to the airport. And arrived at the airport 45 minutes before the American Airlines app had scheduled the departure, knowing the flight was still 2 and half hours away from actually departing. The check in desk would not allow them to check their bags in even tho my husband tried to show them the inbound flight had not taken off and told them that they needed to rebook and told them to get out of the line. As they walked away they got a text that their flight was delayed another three hours. They decided to go back to the desk to attempt to check in with a different agent who allowed them to check in. However, the original first class agent thought that they were trying to be sneaky and got mad that they were trying again. The kicker is, within 5 mins of actually checking bags the flight got canceled. How is Flight Aware a better resource than the airline itself?