The Minion from Savage and normal mode are the same...
You can just asume on the base of the mount, that drops every kill, but not everyone who has the kill has the mount.

And yeah, Shinryu Normal was a well tuned fight. All you needed was a basic knowledge of your job. If you have done the ARR primals you can feel lucky to know a little how the special attacks work if not you can figure it out from the elemental name or from the effect. Nothing really special about it.
The only ones with real drawbacks were the new players using leveljumps, they couldn't know this all, but they can figure it out easyly.
But mostly you just hear "This sh*t is to hard to facerole and shouldn't gate people from endgame!" but if you didn't do your jobquest and didn't care to learn a just a bit higher tuned fight like this you aren't ready for the "endgame".