That's ... actually not true. Carronades were designed to have a "smashing" effect due to their relatively large balls and small charges; the sacrifice in range was considered worth it for the enormous holes they could punch in enemy ships (or for the effect they could have as antipersonnel weapons loaded with grape or musket balls). They were often called "smashers" for that exact reason.

To skip back a couple hundred years: The problem the English fleet had around the time of the Spanish Armada was that the guns of the time had relatively long muzzles and largish charges, leading to high-velocity shot punching through ships without creating much damage to them. Many of the casualties in the period I'm interested in were caused by splinters breaking off from the ship and causing lacerations among the crew. To achieve that, English and later British gun founders accepted lower muzzle velocities and somewhat larger caliber of balls, especially when iron cannon became more widely available in England. Even though iron guns are arguably worse than bronze, they were still well-liked by shipbuilders.

To get back to your other question -- it wouldn't be practicable in the 1800s to have a long gun firing a ball the caliber of a carronade. The most common type of carronade -- the kind you'll see if you visit HMS Victory -- fired a 68-pound ball. The largest long guns on the Victory were bored to take a 32-pound ball, and themselves weighed 56 long hundredweight, or in modern terms, something just north of 6200 pounds. (There's a reason the long guns on Victory were replaced by fiberglass -- they were slowly breaking its back.) These things don't quite scale linearly, but a long gun of that caliber would probably top out around 10,000 pounds, which wouldn't be practical to carry at all.