The reserve cryptocurrency of the internet needs to be fast and offer cheap transactions so that it can easily and cheaply be moved between exchanges.
I think it will take some time before another cryptocurrency takes the place of Bitcoin. Part of the problem is that very few people currently have the skills to evaluate a cryptocurrency based on its technical merits. So exchanges are not currently in a position to agree about what the next reserve cryptocurrency should be.
I think that replacing Bitcoin with Ethereum right now would be a mistake. Ethereum has a lot of big scalability hurdles - I think that technically Ethereum actually has more hurdles to overcome than Bitcoin - Their community does seem a lot more motivated though; but I'm not sure that will be enough. Ethereum still needs to switch to Proof-of-Stake and THEN it needs to implement sharding.
Also, I don't think that pruning will be feasible for Ethereum. It wouldn't make sense to prune the Ethereum blockchain because that would entail pruning out smart contracts. Most no-smart-contract cryptocurrencies are not limited in this way.