A quick google search seems to suggest i have to download the entire 16 years of bitcoin history from bitcoin core that may take hours/days??
It's been a long time since I've used armory, but I recall there is a way to use it without having to sync it with bitcoin core. If you're using Windows check the Start Menu entries for "Armory (Offline)". IIRC, on Linux you need to open the terminal and type
armor --offline. As long as you know which addresses are funded and need to be recovered, you can extract the private keys from them and import them into a SPV wallet like Electrum.
I've tried Armory around 2016-18, I found it very difficult to use, it never synced with my node and it seems that the code has not been updated since 2018, which makes me think that the devs have abandoned its development, it would be a more amazing wallet than it was in the past, what a shame.
I don't think it's abandoned
goatpig still active here on the forum he maintain the
armory section I don't know the reason why goatpig didn't update and release a new version but the armory works just fine even on the latest version of Bitcoin Core.
The only thing that you cannot find on Armory is the most recent features that some wallets support but it works just fine if you setup this wallet properly. It is way better if you use it as an offline wallet and Electrum as your watch-only wallet.
It works on Windows, but I'm having trouble getting it to work on Debian 12. The released version calls for Python2, but that's been depreciated in newer versions of Linux. I did notice in the git repository that Settings.py was updated 4 months ago to allow the engine to pick the installed version of pyqt. I'm trying to build it from source at the moment, but I keep running into missing dependencies, so it's slow going.