No, in the heuristic approximation you are using here, the strong interaction does not weaken with distance; it strengthens with distance, so it takes more and more energy to try to pull two quarks apart, for example, as they get further apart (whereas the energy it takes to pull, say, an electron and a proton apart gets less and less as they get further apart).

So, for example, if you try to pull apart the quark and antiquark inside a pion, at a distance scale of roughly a femtometer, the energy required to pull the two quarks apart is large enough to create another quark-antiquark pair, and so you end up with two pions. You never get free quarks.

Similar remarks would apply to trying to pull a gluon out of, say, a glueball; you just end up making more gluons and making the glueball larger; you never get free gluons.

That sort of makes intuitive sense, right? If the force were weaker so that it "snapped" at 10 femtometers, you'd expect protons themselves to be somewhere in that size range as well.

(Or am I totally wrong?)

I _think_ I expect it to be quite high. My understanding is it's "weak" because it falls off quickly, past a certain distance, due to the force carrier having mass.

This is the explanation for why when we collide beams of protons at near c they don’t produce a new higher energy particle, but a massive shower of secondary and tertiary particles like pions and kaons as a result of the decay chain from initial pair production.