I do my best! I spend all my time obsessively reading up on such topics because, frankly, I couldn’t imagine anything more important than understanding how the world around us works. I do have a few other hobbies, but all roads circle back to quantum mechanics. And understandably, nobody else really wants to talk about it because it doesn’t interest them and they find it complicated (which I suspect is only because they find it boring; people say I’m “so smart” but I think most of the credit lies with me happening to find the topic truly fascinating) so I spend a lot of time trying to think of accessible explanations in the off chance someone is willing to listen to me ramble.

I think our understanding is mostly just observational at this point. Color charge “must” be conserved because we’ve never observed any phenomenon in which it wasn’t. It’s like the conservation of mass and energy, except it’s really the conservation of symmetry. High energy collisions of photons can create matter, but it’s always in matter-antimatter pairs. Anti-particles carry equal but opposite charges of their particle counterparts in order to maintain symmetry. We can’t just create charges out of nowhere. For example, neutrons (net neutral) can decay into protons (net positive) by emitting an electron which carries away the negative charge. So when quarks change their color charge, they must emit a gluon with a color-anticolor charge to carry it away.

We’re still working on the why, but all we know is that we haven’t observed anything that contradicts these observations. Or at least as far as I can recall off the top of my head; I vaguely recall something about weak interactions violating symmetry, but I don’t have that bit quite as well researched as the basics.