"When you decide what infrastructure to use for a project, you're not just making a technical decision. You're also making a social decision, and this may be the more important of the two. For example, if your company wants to write some software, it might seem a prudent choice to write it in Java. But when you choose a language, you're also choosing a community. The programmers you'll be able to hire to work on a Java project won't be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a project written in Python. "
That may be why the OP is having trouble finding talent, because talent doesn't like the stacks he used.
While I would choose LAMP over J2EE any day where the choice is available, it would be due to the community strictly from a technology forecast POV. The issues with Java as a community stem from any combination of things, from a slow evolution of the language and JDK, to Oracle's handling of the community and assets. OpenJDK is making that a little less worrisome, but as far as infrastructure goes, I would say LAMP (P: Perl/Python/PHP) offers the more reasons to choose it.