I only use phones for the clock, alarms, rolodex, calendar, and sometimes calling/texting. As a camera? Pretty much never unless I need video.
Got a D3000 and D7000 which I’ll be keeping forever. Will invest in more glass, but even now I’m pretty much set for life. My 28mm-300mm does like 99% of all shooting I do. If I need a wider aperture for a tighter DOF, I’ll use my 70mm-200mm f/2.8. Wider landscape shots, the cheap featherweight but astonishingly excellent come-with18mm-55mm is a must.
I’ve used my 50mm f/1.8 for night shots, going around snapping Christmas Lights around town, etc. But most of my other lenses pave pretty much sat unused.
Camera bodies start suffering from “digital rot” from even before you take 'em out of the box. 2wks from now, there’ll be another body with another 58Mpix sensor that now you need a 128gigameg card just to take a handful of pix. And unless you’re making wall-sized blowups, that’s resolution you really don’t need. And chances are the glass you’re using won’t even get a clear focus across the entire pic anyway, 3especially not in the corners.
Me? I used to specialise in high-speed motion shots. Birds, bees, odos (dragon- and damselflies), etc., in-flight. I posted a pic of a dragonfly in flight, and was accused by some jackass of faking it, of using a perched dragonfly on a stick or something, then photoshopping out the legs and stick. Funny thing is, I don’t even use P$, and only use IrfanView to crop, etc., any pix.
So I pointed out the legs and how they’re tucked in like helicopter skids, not just erased or whatever. And then just for spite, I took a series of other odo-in-flight closeups so zoomed in that you could count his nosehairs.
Oh, and he trash-talked me publicly that my pix were “impossible”, hence, had to be fake. I pointed out that just because they’re impossible for him, doesn’t mean they’re impossible for me. 
Point being, there’s nfw anyone can get that kind of shot on a phone. Even a bird in flight like some raptor just hanging in mid-air at a distance might come out, but zoomed in? Digital zoom just doesn’t cut it. Maxed out, you’ll just see bird-blur with no features.
I’ll see if I can dig up some old shots.
If you can get some trees and rocks to stand still, absolutely, a good-quality phonecam can get a great shot, as long as you don’t look too closely. Try a 100% crop, and nope.
But for taking “webpix” and the like, phones are perfectly adequate. Get into a fenderbender and need pix of the damage (and also to snap pix of the other guy’s plate and vin by the dashboard!!), the phone’s camera is perfect. No one should be expected to carry around a DSLR just for that.
Just use the right tool for the job.
