To all 2.3L Ford Ranger owners...?

The rattling is pretty much a standard problem, it comes with age. As for the acceleration and maintaining speed, just went through this with a 96. It seems that there were several exhaust system problems, the prior owner had elected to modify the truck and in the process left O2 sensors out and was using resistor banks to fool the ECM. This resulted in lost power and poor fuel economy. Once the exhaust system was put back right these problems were pretty much solved. After all a 2.3 is small engine for this size truck. It is unreasonable to expect it to run like a larger engine for hill climbing and off line zip.

I own several vehicles in this age group or older, and more then one has had poor performance because of cracked weld, missing gaskets and/or rusted exhaust pipes. So have the exhaust system checked out, most important area is from the head to the post cat O2 sensor.