“Would you prefer those same two be elected by your Sacramento legislators and make them 100% directly unaccountable to the voters ?”
That’s the point. My two nutjob senators are exactly what the Sacramento legislators would have appointed to the US Senate. These senators are supposed to represent the interests of Michigan, not California.
At least Michigan would’ve had a fighting chance to have elected Republican Senators (since you still have the State Senate and had the House until 2007), so one might be able to argue the 17th would’ve been more recently advantageous to that state, but for more than half the states (CA, NY, most of the Northeast, IL, et al) it wouldn’t be. When this argument came up awhile ago, I listed what the makeup of the U.S. Senate would look like now, and the numbers were scarcely different overall. The fact that you’d have some states not having elected GOP Senators to DC since the 19th century, even now, is what is particularly disturbing.