I read about prune option right now, actually i didn't hear about it before.
Yes this option can save some disk space but afaik first (awful N-days lasting) synchronization still requires to download full database.
My approach also cuts database and replaces all old blocks (except say last 6 blocks for security reason)
with series of blocks with rolled initial totals and optionally purged from tiny wallets crap (storing on six thousand current nodes and on the swarm of full wallets
information that John have 100 satosi is too expensive for us and we may annually clear that balance as fee for miners or just delete).
So almost all nodes can hold only the rolled database (i can't estimate compression ration of the rolled database now, i am not advanced user as you can see).
And only much less amount of archive nodes holds full expanded database.