Why should they? I don't want the column sizes to change under me, I want them to stay as they were left. Some text labels (filename, other meta etc) could be too large to display anyway.
That said, you can double click the right divider on any column to have it expand to fit the largest of its contents.
Well, I want the window to expand to show me the content of the folder and the file metadata without me having to do anything special - no hotkeys, no special zones to remember.
This would make it actually useful, as a utility, rather than something I have to service, as a user, on a frequent basis in order to get the details I want.
It just seems so obviously broken and such an obvious feature that I can't think why it isn't being done .. nearly every other file-system explorer interface I use, on Linux and occasionally Windows, can show this information properly through auto layout without human intervention .. yet Finder is some kind of special.