Not sure who told you that, but you can go to any gun store in NJ and buy hollow points.
There are restrictions as to where you can have them, but at home is not one of them. You can also shoot them at the range or to hunt. As there is no carry in NJ, other than those places it doesn't really matter. Retired LEOs can carry expanding ammo, but there are only a few ammos that don't meet the hollow point definition and as you said, they don't work very well.
On the other hand, a normal resident who get caughts on the parkway with a .22 hollow point that fell out of his pocket and he's in serious trouble.
Dear malsua,
Why do you think I used the term:
“Last I heard from ‘the gun boards’”?
I read various gun boards, including ‘The High Road’, ‘The Firing Line’ and ‘pistol-forum.com’.
The discussions are there to be read, and that is where I derived my information.
Nobody ‘told me’ anything. As to my location, I have no such limitations of any kind, other than not having it on the shelf. My choice of fondness are full semi-wadcutters, which have no ‘engineered to fail’ issues.