I personally have a Nikon 3000 and it does everything you really need with a solid top of the line DSLR. To me anything 10 MPs or higher is solid. From years of both analog and digital photography experience and even a bit of teaching it's about 20% camera 80% photographer. Give a great photographer a crummy cheap or old camera and they'll almost always be able to get something decent or workable out of it. Think musicians and music. Jimi Hendrix could play the sh** out of a piece of junk guitar and you'd know it was Jimi Hendrix. Hands down he'd sound a bit better on a top of the line guitar, but so what? It's Jimi Hendrix.
The best way to get the best photos is to have lots and lots of patience with yourself, play with your camera, cycle through and try all of the settings, quality, focuses, the bells and whistles. After a while the special features just become redundant.
Remember the first camera was a candle and a lens that projected images onto flat surfaces for artists to paint. Some say this is how Da Vinci did the Mona Lisa.
The next camera was a pinhole camera--essentially a light-tight box with a removable panel and a tiny hole cut into one of the sides of the box. Remove the panel and expose the light-sensitive paper to whatever you were pointing at your camera at. You can still do this today!
Matthew Brady--famous civil war photographer, arguably the first photo-journalist and one of the great innovators of the art form used to have his entire darkroom set up on a wagon that he took with him, pulled by an employee, to various scenes. In those days you had to sit still for a long while to get the exposure just right.
So, no matter what camera you have, as long as you're completely comfortable with it, you'll be able to get something that works out of it.
Now if Matthew Brady had had a DSLR... would he have been making custom action figures of the civil war and photographing those? Possibly.
