For the storage consumption part, I find the archiving method quite interesting or even pruning. We could have even further "lite" nodes, whereas they only sync the latest xM blocks and then verify it for another xM before pruning/archiving their old one. Though we would have to have some nodes keep the entire block log for times when other nodes have to retrieve the data, whether for API calls or just blockchain stability.
If this could be done, I don't see a reason why we wouldn't be able to reduce block_log to something minuscule, like only a few gigabytes.
For storage use https://dstor.cloud on @telosnetwork which has partnership with hive
Whatever happened with that partnership, I feel like there could be more things we could collab on but I don't even think they're using Hive to blog/update us on whatever Telos is doing, I frankly have close to no idea what they do.