It's been a while, but the dinos were played with well beyond a simple nerf, keep that in mind. Things like having more useful weight capacities, changing stamina/stamina drain and move speed, etc.
I didn't like what it did to shark mounted combat personally because it just felt off to me (icthy were funny fast sprinters though), but it was much better on land. For instance parasaurs are actually really useful as a mount early game - vanilla raptor speeds, faster travel in water, small bush gathering aoe, decent carry weight, early saddle, etc... roam around on the back of one of them with a dilo tribe in support and you're sweet as (killed a low level spino that way by accident at one point actually).

Keep in mind that the better drops made high rarity saddles a definite thing, which meant a high powered dino with a high powered saddle stomped things still. To compensate they made alphas far far more dangerous so that you still had an endgame challenge.

Essentially, AR dinos have 2 things done to them. Wild dino's get a significantly different stat increase, that is more equivalent to a player leveling them up. Thems makes them much more fearsom, and high level dinos (wild) are even more valuable.

Tamed dinos have been "nerfed" if you are using low level tamed dinos. If you tame a level 110-150 you will still get the same general stat increase that you did from vanilla, but you will definitely still be wary of the wild dinos. If you tame a lvl 125+ rex, and get 30 levels into it though, there is very little that will be able to stop you. You wouldn't want to jump head long into a heard of brontos and trikes and ankylos..... but 2 brontos wouldn't be much of a problem.

Thanks for the feedback, sounds like I will definately give AR a shot than. I don't really like how OP the vanilla leveling is. Just to bad the new baby dinos feature can't be fixed to be AR yet.