Ahhhh, you've come to the right place, Grasshoppah.
I have lived in the desert SW for more than fifty years. I'll try to be brief.
Properly applied stucco will last for a very long time. Now you can get all kinds of spray treatments from ceramic to elastic paint that stretches 600%.
Stucco is just a cement product made from concrete, lime, sand, and maybe a couple of other things. It can be colored. It's just a bitch to get a consistent color unless you are making it in big batches, and can use the exact amounts of ingredients each time. Color comes in one pound bags, and it's easy to get it off a shade or three.
However, your question is on longevity and maintenance. Properly applied stucco has a "weep screed" along the bottom that runs basically along the bottom plate on the outside of the building. It is drilled with holes on the bottom so that when the stucco gets wet, the water migrates downhill from the gravity and evaporates. If it doesn't, then you have mold problems, or the lime starts to leach out, and it appears white. Amazingly, some very high dollar homes in Las Vegas retirement communities were constructed without weep screed. It was in the laws, but someone got paid, and they saved like thirty dollars a house. Well, long story short, the builders took it in the neck and replaced a lot of work.
Check for the weep screed issue. If it is an older house, it may be grandfathered in, and not required. But, you still have the problem of the water not having anywhere to go except inside the house.
Next big culprit is water itself. Rain will run off, and dry up. Continual drowning from sprinklers will cause stucco to sluff off and the lime to leach out BIG TIME. You can see it on the exterior of some property owner's walls where the water system on the inside is keeping the block wet 24/7, and the stucco is sluffing off.
Next, is just settling, tree root heave, and age. Lots of cracks in stucco. Elastomeric paint helps, but just to a point. After that, it's stucco patch, and repaint.
I'd say five to seven years is not unheard of, but if you don't drench it a lot with sprinkler water, have a weep screed that's properly installed, don't have too many shady spots that never dry out, and just keep it up as you go, that you can go longer than that. It all depends on the quality and mix used in initial construction. And stucco is easy to paint, so you can have a new color every ten years or so. Paint's a little spendy, and it takes a MONGO airless to pump it, it's so thick. It will burn out a Graco XR7 in fifteen minutes if you get the paint flowing at all.
Inspection is easy. Look for cracks. Settling. Sluffing that looks like white alkali cauliflower. Wet spots that stay wet. Take an ice pick and jab it when no one's looking. You can take a pocket mirror and check for the weep screed. Anyone who tells you it isn't important is trying to sell you a bridge.
Hope this helps. Good luck.
Steve