Great to see your results. Another thing I note from almost all of the renders I see across the board are that High Dynamic Range (required by high intensity lights) is avoided, presumably because people are used to looking at photos and renders on screens which do not accurately represent what the human eye sees. We have such amazingly complicated systems of vision that as we look around a scene in real life, our eyes and brain constantly adjust to the changing contrasts, leaving the impression/memory of the scene as that system has rendered it in our minds. But irides stop down in bright light and open up in dark, so when we look at an image on a screen, it's not at all what we would truly see, but more like what we think we saw.

Your second render at light intensity 8000 shows that overexposure effect, which more realistically represents what a bright light should do, until the eye stops down. As you've started playing with the light cone, with the intensity falloff from 100% to 0% between angle start and angle end, you could try making them the same value, or reducing angle end so less intense light is cast on the walls, then you might not need to angle them to cut diffuse reflections.

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