Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

The single most important element in cooking:

Fresh and high-quality ingredients. Even the simplest recipe or technique benefits and is enhanced by what you put in as much as what you do to it.

The single most important ingredient is shopping -- or sourcing. Finding really great quality... or unusual ... spices or condiments or whatever you want to put together. Eventually. So for me, I have a pantry of exotica... that I use to augment the freshest basic ingredients I can find.
You can't improvise if there are no ingredients to improvise from. And if the ingredients are second rate, the results show up on the plate.
You can have great technique, but if a box of instant oatmeal is all that's in your pantry, you're not making anything much more exotic or interesting than oatmeal.