Wayne,
Not sure I know how to answer your questions around developing a look or style with a particular camera, and how you capture things. I looked through your dance class gallery, and you have some very nice shots in there. You are capturing more of the environment or mood or setting to some degree, and that looks good. One of my impressions was that things looked a bit dark, but that may be what you were trying to convey as part of your theme or representation. I never think about that as only being done with a certain camera. One could do that with a Leica M8, a Canon G9, a Nikon, or whatever, if you have the settings you want and use the lenses to achieve your objective. The softer focus is not dissimilar to a Leica 35/2 pre-aspheric lens, as an example, shot wide open. So that sort of "look" is attainable different ways, and you should not think about being locked into a certain camera.
On the flip side, dealing with processing, if those shots were done in RAW, you could do a lot of adjustments and things to them to achieve other looks also, without doing anything to the files in the process. You are more limited with the JPEGs, but you still can do a fair number of things, should you want. If you are looking for a camera to create a certain look as you "signature" as might be the case in some of the books you mention, I would not know how to discuss that as much, as those photographers set their cameras, or process their images in a way that they like. It is not about the camera, though snapshots from some cameras will have a certain look to them.
As for getting the most from your JPEGs.....I would always recommend shooting them at the largest size and least compression your camera offers, and also to go with a more neutral capture mode, rather than high contrast, or high saturation or something like that. While the file may look "flat" to begin, you will have more information upon which to make some adjustments with tools available in various applications. You can always increase contrast, brightness, saturation and things like that in post, but if the file conversion at time of capture set some of these things to extremes, that information may not be there. Not sure if that helps answer your questions or not.
LJ