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The House is popularly elected. Why should the Senate be appointed in the same way? That just defeats the system of checks and balances (especially considering how presidents nowadays are also selected by something that comes very close to popular election) -- all the branches of government are staffed by popularly elected politicians, who have the same interests and thus little interest in blocking one another. (Even the one exception -- the federal courts -- are now staffed by people nominated and confirmed by popularly elected politicians, so that they are unlikely to oppose them either).

When the Senate was appointed by the state legislatures, the people in the Senate tended much more to be statesmen. And those statesmen had veto power over legislation, confirmation of presidential appointments, treaties, and so on. In those days, when the senators truly represented the states, federal judges, including the Supreme Court, paid much more attention to states' rights.

I'm not at all sure it's practical today to restore the old pre-17th-Amendment way of selecting senators. An alternate way of restoring checks and balances that I have thought about is to adopt the old Athenian way of selecting the members of the lower houses of our legislatures, including the U.S. House of Representatives: choose them by lot. Ancient Athens chose most of its officials by lot.