Thanks for passing by!
What do you exactly mean by synthesizing the strong force? It is there and this is what makes the matter coherent (particles are glued together and are not wandering all around in the universe thanks to it). If you want an example of experiments in which the strong force is important, you can take any particle physics collider experiments where it consist of the basic key principle.
It's just a crazy idea, I'm sure. But we're somewhat adept at manipulating the electromagnetic force. We build motors, for example, that focus the force and direct it to do things at our will. And we're somewhat adept at manipulating electromagnetic radiation: light, radio, radar, optical fiber, etc.
But I see the strong force as being stuck inside the atom. Sure, we can throw things at an atom. But that gets dull. ;) What if we could build machines that use the strong force, synthesize it from something more fundamental, and direct its power down channels of our creation?
The huge difference between the strong and the electromagnetic force consists of their range. As you said, the strong force has an extremely short range. In contrast, the EM force as an infinite range (although it is mainly screened). This is why we can do things with EM, whilst we can do anything with the strong force without breaking the atoms first.
And that freaks me out a little. How can a force (the strong force) overcome the electromagnetic force binding same charge protons in a nucleus, but its field only extends a short distance? That's weird. It's super powerful, yet super limited. But I have the same trouble understanding gravity, which seems to be a puny little force (it takes so much freaking mass to create it, it's ridiculous). Yet its range seems infinite.
The strong force has a range of a bunch of femtometers. This is the order of magnitude of the atomic nucleus. Therefore, strong interactions are relevant here.
Gravity is the weakest of all forces. On top of that, it is proportional to the masses of the interacting objects, which makes it even weaker. Why it is so weak is a good question. The good answer is probably that we don't know (at least yet :) ).
With the crazy stuff in 11-dimensional string theory, anything is possible. There could be a spatial dimension orthogonal to the ones we know about, but is inaccessible (for some reason) to us mere 3 dimensional beings. Occasionally, we see things popping in and out of our 3D hyperplane that we can't explain (like particles in the Dirac sea?), so why can't forces dissipate out of our hyperplane into surrounding ones? That might explain the weakness of gravity, if it were a force that we are "sharing" with other multidimensions.