Statesman - Plato

This dialogue starts strangely.  Socrates meets up with a stranger.  Accompanying him is a man named Theaetetus and a young man who is also named Socrates.  Socrates, the usual star of our dialogues, decides to let his younger namesake talk with the Stranger so that he can be taught about statesmen. 
The conversation is wide ranging and covers quite a bit.  The Stranger tells a story of a people that existed before mankind.  This story suggests cycles of time where things start out good and then evil creeps in.  I'm not sure how this ties in with general Greek mythology. 
There are many interesting questions raised, the most interesting was about the legitimacy of general laws. 

Stranger: He [the statesman] will lay down laws in a general form for the majority, roughly meeting the cases of individuals; and some of them he will deliver in writing, and others will be unwritten; and these last will be traditional customs of the country.
Young Socrates: He will be right.
Stranger: Yes, quite right; for how can he sit at every man's side all through his life, prescribing for him the exact particulars of his duty? Who, Socrates, would be equal to such a task? No one who really had the royal science, if he had been able to do this, would have imposed upon himself the restriction of a written law.

We only look to our laws in the general sense.  The idea of creating a law for an individual seems very off base.  The closest that we come to it is when laws are tailored for a narrow type of industry, for instance realtors.  But even then, the laws are based on broad concepts of justice like fraud and fair dealing. 
Again, as has been the case with other writings from Plato, I came away challenged but unsatisfied.  The dialogue veers from subject to subject and I'm never quite happy with the divisions and signposts that are put up.  My inner Aristotle wanted to yell 'Stop!' so that I could clean up the categories and actually explore them with completeness. 
Plato (and Socrates and in this case the Stranger) are obviously brilliant people.  I just continually get the impression that they're talking solely to win arguments.  I don't get the impression that they're actually illuminating a subject in the way that I do with writings from Locke or Mill.