"dinos with feathers?....do we KNOW that yet? and if some did, it would hardly prove birds arose from them."

The argument that birds are dinosaurs has been cut and dried for years. It's now a case of discovering where the divide lies, although it's going to be really, really subtle and will be based on (I'm guessing here) a combination of molecular and anatomical features. Although creationists bleat on about the lack of transitional fossils the truth is that in the case of early birds we have lots of transitional fossils, some with significant sample sizes. It's even possible that feathers are not restricted to dinosaurs but might have originated earlier in the archosauria; pterosaurs have structures very similar to the simplest known feathers. Flight didn't originate in birds either as other dinosaurs could fly.

Were you about in the Cretaceous you'd be hard pressed to tell whether you were looking at a bird or non-avian dinosaur, as they would be indistinguishable; bear in mind modern birds are only one branch of the whole clade, the others being extinct.

This is a very exciting area of research, but consider this: the dinosaurs never died out and they live alongside us to this day. The sparrow outside you back door is one of 10,000 species of living, breathing dinosaurs that continue to thrive to this very day.