I think the idea in the Senate is that those people would have been seasoned bureaucrats who were intimately familiar with law - lawyers in particular. The House was more the everyday man representing the people of his district.

Now that we vote for senators, too, I’m not sure what role they really play. I’d also add that we need to remove the cap on headcount in the house. I did the napkin math once and we should have something like 2.5x the representatives we have now, IIRC.