I have suffered from that annoying problem for about as long as OS X has existed. I even started a thread on the topic (I’d link to it, but I think it got lost when the forum moved to Discourse) but I never really solved it. No matter what pref I deleted or which Finder workflow we tried, it never held on to my preferred settings. And nuking my entire user home just to fix this issue was not a viable option.
Ultimately, the best I could do was create an AppleScript (thread here) which I can invoke to get the Finder window set to the dimensions and view I want. But every Finder restart I need to run it again. Sigh. ;)