HondaHonda. I think you are just at a low point in the maintence schedule is all. I don’t see any reason why you won’t get this fixed and your car will be back to almost new condition. Well, maybe not almost new, but at least good condition.
The work you described is not uncommon at all for a 1996. It’s a 16 year old car with 250K miles on it after all. Perhaps it was driven a little hard in the past, that could explain the need to replace the suspension parts, which is a little unusual, but that’s done, and as long as it is still running ok with relatively minor repairs needed, why not keep it on the road? New spark plugs and a valve cover gasket, that’s routine maintenance. So is a new cat converter. You’d likely have to do that work with any car of that vintage you buy. Why trade a known set of completely workable problems for another set of unknown problems?
Are you doing this work on your car yourself? That can be frustrating, especially if you are new to working on cars. If so, do yourself a favor and buy the Honda shop manual for it. Then read it carefully, especially the first three chapters, the introduction and safety precautions, the routine maintenance, and the tune-up sections. You don’t have to do this work by guesswork when you have the manual.
Most experienced home handymen use the manufacturer’s shop manual to fix their own car. You can become an expert on your own car if you have this manual. It has the specific instructions and tools for your specific make & model and year of Honda. If Honda doesn’t have it in stock any more, look for a used copy on Ebay or Amazon. Or they might have it at your local library. Or the next town’s local library. Look around a little and eventually you’ll find a copy. Having this manual will save you a lot of time fixing your own car. Maybe Honda has it available on line? Doesn’t hurt to look for it there.
You mention you don’t want to use the jack to get access to the underside. No experienced home mechanic would do that either. You are right. It isn’t safe. Experienced home mechanics would either use ramps (like you apparently have now) or they’d jack the car up with a shop floor jack and then place jack-stands at the recommended support points (see the manual for where these points are). No experienced mechanic would crawl underneath a car only supported by a jack. That’s very dangerous. This is a good reason why you should read the safety chapter of the shop manual for your car before doing further work on it.
I had a manual xmission Honda before, and it was very reliable. The only routine maintenance I did on it was change the oil and filter and check the other fluids every 10K, and do the basic tune-up procedure (spark plugs and ignition timing) and flush the cooling system every 50K. That car never gave me much trouble. I think you’ve got a good car that just needs a little work.
One more thing. There’s a lot of experienced folks here. Almost all of them are better mechanics than I am. If most of them – like it appears to be – say your idea to use some kind of cleaning procedue to fix the cat isn’t the right approach, if it were me, I’d listen to what they say. Best of luck.