Collimating a newtonian f/5

[kf4zmt]

I have an Orion SkyView Deluxe 6" telescope. It is an f/5 (750mm focal length). I have been struggling to get the optics aligned. I've read everything I can get my hands on about collimating and followed the instructions to the best of my ability. In spite of this, I still think the images in the eyepiece are degraded compared to when I first purchased this scope 18 months ago. I've read that star testing is the final step to the collimation process but it requires magnifications from between 20x and 50x inches of aperture. To achieve 300x magnification for my telescope it would require a 2.5 mm focal length eyepiece. The closest thing I have is a 9 mm. So, this leads me to a couple of questions:

Is anyone familiar with this model of Orion telescope and can anyone speak to the optical quality of it?

What kind of optic quality should I realistically expect from this telescope?

Can anyone make a recommendation about how to star test the telescope to try and diagnose what my alignment errors are given my eyepiece limitions?

-Any- advice that anyone can pass along would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks