Must say I don't think I could bring myself to buy a vehicle with no sump plug!
My solution is a nice big metal tray with an old 5 litre oil container with the top cut out:
Stick the car up on stands, slide the tray and container under and pull the plug - Voila! - Can't remember when I last managed to mark my slabs. Mind you, I do like the oil to be fully up to temperature before draining which means I either do it immediately after returning from visiting one of my boys or taking the car for a decent drive before draining. Just because the water temp comes up to "normal" is not enough, you need to drive around for at least 3 times as long to get a decent oil temp built up. If you do this the oil will be like water in terms of viscosity so it flows rapidly and it's surprising, on a "neglected" vehicle, how much "crud" you'll find comes out with it. Take care though, the oil is going to be very hot and you might get a nasty burn if you are careless. The metal tray - about 4 ft long and 15 ins wide - is long enough that it can also catch drips from the oil filter if I'm in a hurry and need to deal with the filter whilst letting the oil drain. I always prefill oil filters before fitting so sometimes you get a bit of spillage when fitting due to this and the tray always catches it.
In the background you will notice the blue container? It's an old 25 litre (I think) chemical container I picked up empty from a skip on a building site many years ago. I use a cut down 2 litre pop bottle as a funnel - you can see that too if you look closely - and I use it because it holds an inverted canister type oil filter very nicely so it can drain which makes subsequent disposal much less messy. I find I can get best part of a year's worth of waste oil into it (from the cars and gardening machines) so I do a yearly trip to the recycling centre.
I also have the syringe you can see at the front of the picture, here's it's box:
I keep this exclusively for doing transmission oils and I can recommend it. It has a nice large bore pipe which works reasonably well with cold gear oils and it wasn't all that expensive.
Regarding getting the car far enough off the ground for access. When I first started I acquired a pair of ramps. I was still in college and worked at the kerbside with very limited tools and just the car's own jack. Under these circumstances they were a big asset to me but I would often find I'd got the car up on the stands only to find I needed to take a wheel off for some reason. Eventually I bought my first wee trolley jack - which I still have, but with a replacement hydraulic unit as the old one eventually expired about 10 years ago - and a couple of axle stands. Then, later, I found the cars were being built with much longer front overhangs and lower to the road and the stands couldn't be used because the front bumper hit the stands before the wheels could roll up them. So I partially dismantled the stands and welded in extension pieces to reduce the angle on the ramp section. They are now about 4 ft long! However already I had a much larger professional jack and preferred using axle stands anyway so the ramps now just gather dust in the back of the garage. Maybe I'll have a use for them one day?
