re: Wife wants to scrape off and refinish textured ceilings

Ours (built in 1963) had about that same texture.

My drywall guy (who is fantastic) simply skim coated everything. It looks perfect, and we were upgrading (adding) lights to areas and he was able to float those areas at the same time.

Really easy. And there was some dust but he uses a sander that has a vacuum attached that caught most of the dust. We were not living there at the time and he covered all the AC registers\returns and turned off the unit while he was sanding. That keeps the dust from getting into your duck work.

Would do again 100%.