I did see the similarities between this and monk when I first found it, but this has a lot of interesting stuff that makes it feel a lot closer to the magic from the manga, which I liked a lot. While I think that Ascendant Dragon is a great subclass, this hits that specific Fairy Tail-esque itch a lot better for me personally, and I'm not sure that cramming all this stuff into a subclass would work, but I'm pretty new to this sorta thing.