>>64220154 (OP)
.30 U.S Carbine can be very roughly comparable to .357 Magnum from a handgun, not a cannon by any means, but not anemic, at least not for its purpose.
The M1 Carbine was designed to be a replacement for handguns, a lightweight and easy to carry and use weapon which non-grunt troops could use to defend themselves with a lot better (shooting a handgun good is actually pretty difficult). It has much more range than a 1911 pistol, though it doesn't have really long effective range either, the entire purpose of the gun is to be a defensive weapon at fairly short ranges.
It was pretty good at that part, a medic or artilleryman had FAR better odds defending themselves from enemy soldiers when armed with the carbine, than when they were armed with revolvers or pistols.
Such as it is, the M1 Carbine ended up with grunts anyway, and they found that the light and handy weight wasn't just nice, but also that 15rds with hardly any recoil was actually pretty good at CQB ranges, hell, it had longer effective range than a .45 subgun. The magazines were pretty shit, but make sure to regularly replace them, and the gun could work pretty well.
Everyone wanted full-auto and stendos, but that didn't really become a thing until Korea.
In Korea, it gets used more broadly by people, and now an inexplicably less disciplined and well trained army led to people trying to use it at longer ranges, where it obviously didn't fare to well. Add the M2 being frequently used in full-auto (being notoriously jump if bursts aren't kept very short), and it didn't fare any better at long ranges.
So, it was a weapon which was pretty good at close quarters, like it was designed for, but then people wanted to use it at long ranges, often in the worst ways possible (full-auto), and then people started giving it shit for something it was never even meant to do.
