The lift-parent POM calls the repositories scala-tools.release and scala-tools.snapshot (singular), whereas the POM generated with lift-archetype-basic calls these scala-tools.releases and scala-tools.snapshots (plural). This will lead to unnecessary mulitiple and time-consuming lookups to the same repositories.

Example:
[INFO] snapshot net.liftweb:lift-webkit:2.0-SNAPSHOT: checking for updates from scala-tools.releases
[INFO] snapshot net.liftweb:lift-webkit:2.0-SNAPSHOT: checking for updates from scala-tools.snapshots
[INFO] snapshot net.liftweb:lift-webkit:2.0-SNAPSHOT: checking for updates from scala-tools.release
[INFO] snapshot net.liftweb:lift-webkit:2.0-SNAPSHOT: checking for updates from scala-tools.snapshot
Downloading: http://scala-tools.org/repo-snapshots/net/liftweb/lift-webkit/2.0-SNAPSHOT/lift-webkit-2.0-SNAPSHOT.pom
...

I suggest to use identical names everywhere. As there are lots of artifact POMs I suggest to change the names in the lift-parent POM to plural what sounds better anyway.