Hey, um, well heck... I rechecked using scenes\advanced\optics.pov again but
this time I realized I made an incorrect presumption. The cylinder light
radius was insufficient to stretch across both openings in the wall it beams
through (it's a bit offset in the +z, camera at +y?). That's why it appeared
as if half the light beam was showing. So that wasn't a problem after all.
In order to see that indeed the cylinder spotlight can be reflected at
various angles and then shone upon a wall try this. Add:

plane {x,0 pigment {rgb 1} finish {diffuse 1} rotate -30*z translate 3*x}
 // or rotate -45*z

to the end of the optics.pov file. Maybe increase the spotlight color to 3
so that the beam appears bright and that way you don't miss the effect. The
media won't show unless you make the plane hollow or -x but it's much faster
to render that way anyhow.
Fact is, it can do what is expected. What happens in your scene file is a
mystery to me still. I put the same global photons in and tried a few other
things to see if I could get the correct result. Nothing. I'm baffled. Could
be something simple I'm overlooking but I spent longer than I expected just
to check on it again so I figured I had covered all the bases.

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