Very true. What has long puzzled me is the notion of many people about "need" or "must have", in the face of the success of many, many other people who have regularly and successfully used "lesser" equipment.
To be honest I have for the most part always used C&C type bullets. They work and they work well under the proper use. In "most" cases, you put the bullet where it should go, and things go down. Thinking a C&C or even a mono metal bullet, will make up for poor shot placement though is simply a fallacy.
Over the past 10-15yrs not only deer but other animals have gone from being docile forest dwellers to modified armor plated creatures of doom. According to some you might as well use depleted uranium if you even want a slight chance to slow them down.
I was brought up to make a good shot and be done with it. Not shoot things in the rear, or a raking shot, but simply put the bullet in the boiler works and get to skinning. As I grew older I found that this posed a few issues, sometimes you don't get that boiler room shot and you miss out on your shot. I learned through my own experience, it is MUCH better to go this route than to spend several hours tracking and possibly not finding the animal.
So I began to seriously study the anatomy of the deer and other critters I hunted to better enable me to make a killing shot without having that direct broadside. I however DO still put the shot through that area and I respect my pop for teaching me the way he did. I now will take a shot that I can put the bullet through from several directions that still enable me to transect the vitals such as quartering to or away from me. I do not however attempt anything that will not let me see a path from behind one shoulder and out in front of the other or the other way around. I also know that within about 3" of behind most deer shoulders is the diaphragm and paunch, and I will never intentionally make a shot that drives a bullet through there. Just not my style, I don't like the mess nor the usual resulting second shot to finish something off. Even when I went to CO for Mule Deer and Elk I would rather have come home empty handed than to make a shot that wasn't what I wanted to take. Putting something like that in a questionable scenario just doesn't compute.
I have shot hundreds of hogs, and deer in my 40 something years of hunting. I have used about every type of "premium" bullets made at one time or another, and in the end I am right back to square one. Just put them where they should go and the standard old fashion C&C bullets work and work every time. Yes you might have one lose the core, but on the flip side you might have one of the "premium" type not expand at all, or shed it's petals, both of which I have experienced more than I cared for.
One other thing that many fail to take into consideration is the impact velocity of the bullets they are using and this also plays a major role in what the end performance is. Run a standard C&C bullets into something at 3000fps or so, and your asking for a separated core. Run a mono metal type bullet into something at 2300fps or less and your going to be lacking in expansion. Shoulder blades on angled shots will drastically change the angle of the bullets path, as such I stay away form them. In front of or behind, I have never had an issue.
The one thing that no matter which type bullet or brand name you use, that you cannot control is that once it leaves the barrel all bets are off. It is going to do, what ever it does when it gets there, right, wrong, or somewhere in between. The best bet you can lay down is to put it where it should be in the first place.
Since I always have been able to get sub-MOA groups and because I've had 95% DRT kills, I've stayed with the little doofers. That way, I don't have to think.