It seems that a prop light with quadratic falloff inside a constant density scatter ball makes for a decent starting point for what I'm trying to achieve. I'll have to play around with this stuff some more and see what else I can get out of it.

I should note that the image here has DOF and also some mild denoising and tone-mapping applied in post effects. Normally I post raw renders, but with all these atmospheric effects it becomes a bit more difficult to get the exact desired results directly in the renderer.

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.