need a quick fix for messed up plaster walls..

As I continue to sand and shellac, I'm thinking I need to try to make the dining room walls look a little better before the trim goes back up.

The problem:
The walls are old fashioned plaster, with a lot of very badly-patched settling-cracks and hideous uneven (up to 1/4 inch thick) texturing. The repaired cracks all bulge outwards, and a few have hairline cracks starting to open up again.



What I would LIKE to do..
I love the look of the original plaster in the few areas of our house where it isn't messed up. So if we still want to own this house after 5 or 6 years (when my husband is up for tenure) I would want to get the plaster walls properly repaired and restored, and I would put in some insulation >_> and shore up the foundation under the dining room while I'm at it.

Why we can't do that right now..
Unfortunately there's no way I'm up for tearing into the walls or messing with the larger structural issues at this point. The heavy texturing is going to be a serious bitch to get rid of. We don't have the funds for a big project now or any nearby friends/family to help out. I've done drywall in the past, but I have no expertise with plaster. And, most importantly, we need to put the room back together ASAP so this place can start feeling like home! :)

We need a short-term fix..
So basically I need to do something to make the walls look slightly less bad for a few years! (*cough* and my entire budget for this is a hardware store gift-card I got for X-mas *cough*). A flat surface is pretty well out of the question, so I'm trying to decide what to use to apply yet another heavy texture to the walls. I'd probably go for a stucco look (something like this), which shouldn't look too out-of-place in our house, given that the 2nd floor exterior is stucco with Tudor half-timber style trim.

Here's the plan I've come up with so far:

-> wash walls with TSP
-> fill existing cracks with painter's caulk
-> slightly roughen existing (heavily textured) paint surface (?not sure how)
-> prime (?before or after texture, depending on method used?)
-> apply sand-textured paint or a paint/drywall mud mixture, knock down with swipes of a trowel
-> paint

then I can get to:
-> sand and refinish floors
-> re-install wood trim

Can anyone here help me out with some advice on this? Does my plan sound like it would work? And if so, would it look substantially better than just throwing a fresh coat of paint over the existing lumps and bumps? Would one type of texture material be less likely than another to crack over the next 5 years? (The house is climate-controlled, but it sits on a hillside that gets saturated during heavy rains-- so some settling is going to continue).

Thanks in advance for any of your thoughts on this!