You might say that I am a CCI fanboy - during the spring/summer I will go through 5000 or so rounds of Mini-Mags shooting gophers and during the rest of the year I usually go through a couple of cases of Std Vel shooting paper from my back deck bench. The Std Vel also does a credible job of putting down blackbirds and magpies, it doesn't really blow them up like the Mini-Mags do they just fold up and collapse when hit with the Std Vel.
The Mini-Mag hollow points do a better job on gophers than the solid points do - they both work but there is no doubt that the HP hits harder.
I too have noticed that the 36 gr HPs seem to be a bit more accurate than the 40's but for shooting pests they both work equally well.