How to make Finder remember its window size and column sizes?

Why doesn't OS X remember the Size of the Finder window and the size of the columns in Cover flow (or any other) view?

It seems like something very basic that should just be there but it's really frustrating when I have to continuously resize columns to see filenames and resize the window so I can see a reasonable amount of stuff.

I know there are script that can allow you to achieve this manually, but that really isn't acceptable. They've had decades to get the simple stuff right. Why doesn't this already happen by default?