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Seems like an oversight to me or an unnecessary penalty that an actual Monk of the Four Winds doesn't benefit fully from taking the Dragon Ferocity.
Special: Taking this feat allows you to qualify for the Elemental Fist feat (Advanced Player's Guide 158) even if you do not meet that feat's prerequisites. If you do not meet that feat's prerequisites, you must choose one of the damage types that feat offers, and you can use only that damage type with your Elemental Fist attacks until you meet the feat's normal prerequisites. A monk with this feat can use Elemental Fist as if he were a monk of the four winds (Advanced Player's Guide 112).
In other words a regular monk with dragon ferocity can gain the full benefits of elemental fist but a monk of the four winds can't gain the full benefits of stunning fist. I recognize that stunning fist is a pre-requisite for the ability. If, however, you've already qualified for and taken stunning fist as a Monk of 4W, it seems fair and unbroken to me that they could gain the same benefits from stunning fist. As it is, they have to wait until they get BAB of +8 for stunning fist which is penalty enough on it's own.
As things stand, you would have to convince your GM to let this work. Can this be errata'd under the Dragon Ferocity description? (Or under the Monk of 4W archetype replacement effect part of the elemental fist description?)
Just one question: Why should they?
Not every feat give the same benefit for every archetype.
I highly doubt that anyone would for example demand that they "fixed" Two Weapon Fighting just because Master of Many Styles can get an additional attack with it while a normal monk can't.
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A monk of 4 winds gets elemental fist at 1st (not normally available til 11th), loses stunning fist(which can be replaced at 11th), and keeps flurry of blows.
A normal monk who takes dragon style keeps stunning fist, can get elemental fist for a single energy type at 7th, and then at 11th gets the full effects of elemental fist, and has flurry of blows.
So, either way, you don't get the full benefits of both until level 11, and getting elemental fist early costs you 2 feats (which i concede most str based monks like to take anyways) but means your feats at 3(dragon style), 5(dragon ferocity), 7(elemental fist), are set. If you want Dragon Roar (which is a decent AoE and debuff), add 9th level feat also set.
A good analysis but the idea of bypassing the feat requirements wasn't really the part I was concerned about. I'm fine with the idea of waiting until I meet the prerequisites.
If you want to take full advantage of the 4 feats in question at the point where you actually fulfill all of the requirements the monk of the four winds is still at a disadvantage over any other monk.
This is because
A monk with this feat can use Elemental Fist as if he were a monk of the four winds
Meaning he basically gains the effects of the class feature elemental fist in addition to the feat. However, a monk of the four winds already has this class feature. My argument is that this must have been an oversight and they should likewise be able to take this feat path to gain the benefits of the stunning fist class feature.
Here are the relevant quotes for the class features in question
At 5th level, and every five levels thereafter, the monk increases the damage of his Elemental Fist by 1d6 (2d6 at 5th level, 3d6 at 10th level, and so on).
At 4th level, and every 4 levels thereafter, the monk gains the ability to apply a new condition to the target of his Stunning Fist.
The RAW for dragon ferocity means that a regular monk has the potential to better fill the niche that the archetype 'Monk of the Four Winds' was originally intended for. A normal monk can apply extra conditions to his targets and gains the same amount of extra damage, a 4W monk can only ever stun for 1 round.
p.s. if you use downtime to retrain feats (as explained in Ultimate Campaign) a monk of the four winds can actually get can dragon ferocity a short time after reaching lvl 9 instead. A regular monk can also qualify for their elemental fist that they took at lvl 7 by lvl 9.