DPR's "review" of the 50D has been (quite correctly) howled down from right, left and centre. DPR is just plain wrong. See for yourself here: http://www.ausphotography.net.au/for...ad.php?t=18890
The funny thing is, I agreed with your take on this until just after the 50D came out. I was certainly not impressed by the "improvement" that the 400D and then the 40D brought to the table in the wake of the (admittedly excellent) 20D/30D twins. On the whole, I generally prefer the images my 20D makes to those of the 40D, though there isn't a lot in it. (Why then did I buy two 40Ds? Because the image quality was about the same as the 20D and I wanted some of the other features it had, notably sensor cleaning. In any case, I'd promised to give my 400D to a family member and I had to replace it with something.)
But the 50D has changed my mind. It delivers significantly more detail than the 40D (or the 20D), so I was wrong. How much further crop cameras can go than the current high water mark of 15MP remains to be seen, but I thought they had hit the wall at 8MP, so who knows? I'll bet you a bottle of good red medicine that the D400 is 16.something MP, or maybe a little more than that, and produces beautiful images.