I don't think pruning is possible, at least not in the way you could with Bitcoin. There are other things we're looking at, but in my opinion pruning is a non-starter for solving this.
Is there any place I can go to learn about the ideas presented thus far?
This is open source correct?
Just discussions on IRC in #monero-dev (we will move to a more archivable format soon) - once something is ready to be formalised it will be proposed and put up for commentary.