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by blueplanet200 1170 days ago
It's not necessarily a questions of "need". Physicists are just measuring what protons ARE. Whether or not gluons and the strong force are necessary to form an object that looks like a proton is a separate point from what protons actually look like in our universe.

To your point on if such an arrangement would be possible or not ignoring the strong force, it would not. The "net-charge" viewed from the +2 quark would be repulsive, resulting in an unstable arrangement of matter, even if you could construct it in an equilibrium state it would be the unstable kind.