Working with the lowest-level data streams representing your network connections does give you a lot of power and control over exactly how incoming messages are parsed and handled. When performance or security is an issue, that byte-level control is invaluable in providing a skilled developer the tools they need to produce the most optimal solution for the task at hand.
However, most of us won't be writing network code with such high demands for performance or security. In fact, most of the code we write will all follow the same series of simple and straightforward patterns of serialization and message generation. That's where the additional Stream classes really come in handy.
