Find a good engine through a reputable or trustworthy source, get a good variant (D17 has many do your research). And as an owner of a D17A in an ek chassis I can assure you that regardless of which transmission type you go for, going from your current driveline acceleration "known colloquially as pick" and mpg or "average" WILL both increase. The latter of course depends heavily on getting O2 sensors installed and working right. Furthermore wiring and others sensors working properly will affect the acceleration largely.
ps. swapping a d17 as a manual usually requires the use of the original eg/ek transmissions unless youre fine with cutting the firewall to run the shifter cables as theres no shift linkages using rods like the eg/ek's do, this is like the k swaps where you need to drill the firewall or use the heater core holes or whatnot.
ps.2. More importantly, finding a d17 with a manual trans (its own one) isnt the easiest task as most available here are from honda streams and they come in auto or atleast 90% of them do and also, if you run a different manual trans and get it running with manual driveline, the manual ecu is a pain in the a$$ to find and a bigger pain in the a$$ to pay for and if you have check engine codes (you will have one if you run a auto ecu without auto tranny) the engine doesn't run on full power, atleast with the O2 sensor missing code it definitely wont go into vtec.
so just run it auto and enjoy sipping coffee in one hand with the other on the wheel, or if you want to go down the manual rabbit hole for a tiny bit more acceleration and a tiny bit more fuel economy and ofcourse a huge amount more driving enjoyment then youre a bit informed on the depth of the rabbithole now 
hope this clears everything up
