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Several abilities/features mention specific Path Tiers, as in
"add your Champion Tier as an insight bonus"
Path Dabbling specifically states that you count your Trickster Tier as the Path Tier for the ability you nab.
Dual Path does not say anything about Path Tiers.
Does that mean that you/your allies/whatever is being referenced do(es) not gain insight/whatever bonus based on your second Path, as it is treated as 0 tier?
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I've addressed this question in a different thread. But this one has a much better title, which is directed to the main issue. Here are my thoughts.
As I see it, there are two possible interpretations of the operation of the Dual Path feat:
1.) You can select a second mythic path, other than the path you selected at your moment of ascension. You gain the 1st level ability of that path, and whenever you gain a path ability, you can select from the list of abilities presented for both paths, as well as from the list of universal path abilities. For the purposes of your secondary mythic path, you have an effective tier level equal to the tier level in your primary path. ["The first interpretation"]
2.) You can select a second mythic path, other than the path you selected at your moment of ascension. You gain the 1st level ability of that path, and whenever you gain a path ability, you can select from the list of abilities presented for both paths, as well as from the list of universal path abilities. For the purposes of your secondary mythic path, you have no effective tier level. This may limit the path abilities you can choose for the second path. ["The second interpretation"]
The first interpretation is obviously the more powerful of the two. It allows you to effectively operate as if you were a mythic character in that second path with respect to the 1st level ability and the abilities you choose. And that may be what Paizo intended by the feat. I don't pretend to have any insight into the original intent of the drafters of these rules. That makes it an excellent feat, and one that many people will want to take.
However, the second interpretation, while less powerful, still seems viable. It allows you to get some (really, most) of the abilities of the secondary path, though it reserves the most powerful abilities (those that rely on tier level) for characters who have chosen that path as their primary path. Characters with the Dual Path feat can still pick from a large number of path abilities, just not all of them. This makes Dual Path a nice feat to get in some circumstances, but hardly a "must have" feat. And while this certainly weakens the feat as compared to the first interpretation, I wouldn't characterize it as rendering the feat totally useless.
Consider a character contemplating the feat Dual Path: Guardian, a prime example, under the second interpretation. At the start, the dual pathing character must pick a Guardian's Call. Based on the second interpretation, Absorb Blow will not serve any purpose, since she doesn't have any tiers in Guardian. However, Beast Fury and Sudden Block are both completely viable.
Next, she has the option to pick Guardian path abilities when she gains access to a new ability. Devastating Smash, Mythic Companion, and Unmovable all have effects tied to your Guardian tier (though only Mythic Companion is totally useless without any Guardian tiers). However, Additional Call, Ally Defense, Call Arrows, Cage Enemy, Catch Hazard, Dimensional Grapple, Drive Back, Epic DR, Quick Recovery, Snatch Spell, and Sweeping Strike are all fully effective without any reference to Guardian tier.
Thus, under the second interpretation, the character that takes the feat Dual Path: Guardian can choose from 2 out of the 3 Guardian's Calls, and can choose from 11 out of the 14 Guardian path abilities. The loss of access to that one Guardian Call and those three Guardian path abilities may be frustrating. But I can't bring myself to say that it makes the Dual Path feat absolutely useless.
As an aside, I note that some path abilities have tier requirements before you can select them. However, in each case, they say "you must be at least [Nth] tier before selecting this ability." They never require levels in any particular tier. Thus, for example, a tier 4 Champion with Dual Path: Guardian could take Dimensional Grapple (which requires you to be 4th tier) since he is tier 4 - just in Champion, not Guardian.
In the end, I think it comes down to what Paizo was trying to accomplish with the feat. Were they trying to open up all the goodies from a chosen path (well, except for the bonus HP and 10th tier ability) to someone who takes the feat? Or were they trying to give people the option to add in some aspects of the chosen path, while reserving some of the aspects for those who chose that path as their primary path. Again, I could see it potentially going either way, though I tend to favor the second interpretation. So far no official answer, though.
I'll also add a final thought. One thing the designers seem to want to avoid is any sort of "must have" feat or ability. If a feat or ability is so good that everyone is going to want to have it in their build, then that fact raises a red flag for the balance of the feat or ability. In this case, while I wouldn't go so far as to say that Dual Path: Guardian, plus Absorb Blow is a "must have" combo, it is good enough to be extremely popular. That alone gives me pause in favoring the first interpretation over the second.
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Further thoughts:
With respect to interpreting the Dual Path mythic feat, I think it's a matter of determining what exactly the designers are trying to achieve with it. Were they trying to make it a powerful feat that granted full tier access to another path, making it very much like multi-classing (what I'll call "the first reading"), or were they trying to grant some, but not all, of a path's abilities to a character not on that path, making it a little less than multi-classing (what I'll call "the second reading")? It's also a matter of where, precisely, they felt that the balance of the feat's worth came down. Did they feel the first interpretation is too powerful as compared to other feats? Did they feel the second interpretation is too weak as compared to other feats?
For my part, I tend to think that the designers are doing their best to keep the game balanced as they add new feats, abilities, etc. It's a heroic task, and one I don't envy them for. They have to make some very hard decisions, and no matter what they decide, some portion of the players are likely to think they were wrong. But they try hard and have done a pretty darn good job so far. And when it turns out that they made a bad call, they do their best to fix it. In fact, they're allowing us to participate in this playtest to raise issues like this so that they can consider them from a play balance standpoint before publication.
But this methodology and consideration is not unique to this situation. Let's look at two existing feats by way of example: Augment Summoning and Empower Spell. When Pathfinder was first released, people had difficulty interpreting them in every situation. Some people wondered, if you used Empower Spell on a Cure spell, would it multiply by 50% just the amount healed by the dice (the weaker reading), or would it multiply by 50% the amount healed by the dice and the amount resulting from caster level (the more powerful reading). Paizo ultimately answered this question in the Official FAQ, siding with the more powerful reading.
Similarly, with Augment Summoning, some people wondered whether you could use Augment Summoning to augment a creature you summoned from a scroll or a wand (the more powerful reading) or whether you could only augment a creature you summoned by casting the actual spell (the weaker reading). Paizo ultimately answered this question in the Official FAQ, siding with the weaker reading.
In both cases, the feat was phrased to leave some ambiguity as to its interpretation. The fact that people asked about the interpretation of these feats, and Paizo addressed these feats in their FAQ tends to support that assertion. (In fact, in both cases, Jason Bulmahn posted unofficial answers for these feats that were the opposite of what was ultimately posted in the Official FAQ.) But Paizo didn't uniformly pick the more powerful reading(nor did Jason). Rather, they looked at issues of balance and playability and picked the interpretation that seemed best to them.
Likewise, in the present situation, I don't think that using the second interpretation would be unduly limiting to people who want to multi-path. All it would do is put a limit on the power they could achieve in their second path. This interpretation would reflect a design decision that (for reasons of fairness and play balance) a character should face certain limitations in the second path they choose (i.e., being forced to expend a feat to gain the second path, being limited in the total number of abilities they can choose from both paths by the total number of abilities they would get in their first path, foregoing the tier ten ability in their secondary path, and being restricted from using those abilities in the other path that rely on tier level in that path). In essence, this would reserve some path abilities to those who chose that path as their primary path. This reading means that dual-pathing is not the same as dual-classing. It sets forth a position that your primary path really is the core of your mythicness, and that you can't properly be a character with two full paths, all you could do was shade your primary path with a secondary path. True, this position means that you can't multi-path the way you multi-class. But that may be what the designers intended - not as a way to hamper players who want to multi-path, but for considered play balance reasons (i.e., they thought true multi-pathing was unbalancing).
Let me say again, I make no claims to know what they designers were thinking when they wrote the Dual Path feat, only that I think the feat lends itself to some ambiguity. Based on what's written, I think that either the first reading or the second reading are supportable (though I tend to favor the second reading as being the more balanced interpretation).