Pruning small trees

Growing trees from seeds have one upside (or downside, it depends) - genetic diversity. Having a number of plants with different genome, I'm trying to take advantage of it. Previously, I've started a 3 trunk fusion, which should make fast growing plants a bit larger. This time I'm going to make slow growing ones even smaller. 

Two smallest ficuses I put into a separate isolated environment, spent there 2 months and developed relatively impressive aerial roots and a multitude of small branches, but were not too interesting otherwise.

So I've decided to experiment with growing very tiny ficuses using these two specimen. 4 days ago I started with repotting:

I performed root pruning, trying to maintain somewhat radial root structure:

After repotting I defoliated them and performed radical pruning:

Four days later, I confirm they've survived and started to regrow some leaves:

Another two seedlings I've root pruned and cut 2 months ago and slip potted a week ago, have grown long but boring branches as well:

I'm not going to touch their roots this time, but I believe it's time for some pruning:

I've left one of two fork branches meaning to make trunk grow sideways. I'm cutting just above leaf nodes expecting cuts to die down to these nodes. I'm keeping couple leaves for these ones to make recovery faster, but eventually I want to keep their leaves small.
I've put cut branches to water with small amount of fertilizer and root hormone to see what happens to them: