it seems doing even Hello World in Lift means getting acquainted with maven. There is no stand-alone ZIP of Lift for easy download (especially on Linux).

Maven is a fairly divisive platform, with lots of supporters and naysayers. I don't think it's in Lift's interest to force it upon users (I personally prefer running with just plain embedded Jetty in my web app and no Maven).

Gregg Bolinger mentions in one of his blogs that the Maven dependency is the reason he never looked into Lift seriously:

http://www.greggbolinger.com/blog/2009/07/29/1248925200000.html

Re: Grails: The Search Really Is Over (For Now)
Comment from Gregg Bolinger on August 5, 2009 3:02:02 AM CDT #
I've looked at Scala. It is supported in Grails now, as is Clojure and something else I can't remember. Anyway, looking at list my first big issue was every tutorial I saw was using Maven. I know some folks like it, I personally don't. Other than that, I have no real opinion of Lift. I haven't looked at it enough.

Please provide a regular ZIP or TAR.GZ of the stable Lift version, together with all dependencies.
Thanks