I agree. The escapade into Palmer Tech was much better than them disarming a nuke (though too much Felicity in the Palmer Tech scenes). However, Oliver and Brick's fight was on point and probably the best hand-to-hand combat fight in the entire season.
Also, one thing they are doing is having other named villains besides the main baddie. For example, in S2 Slade had Blood and Rochev so the main characters had more than one character to face down. S3 sort of lacked that, but at least had Maseo. S1 didn't need other baddies; it was small-scale enough that Merlyn could be the main villain without henchmen, but throughout the entire season there were small-scale villains sprinkled through. S4 lacked that until now, but then Darhk gets Murmur, Andy, and Merlyn as homies, and now Andy's dead but he got replaced by Brick. It's pretty cool to have more than one named villain recurring, so we're not dealing with faceless Ghosts all the time.