Also, putting white paper in front of the lens isn’t the perfect example, which I already said is a quick hack demo anyways. I get that would be a partial obstruction, but that also reflects a lot of the light back in randomly, which gets reflected back out randomly.

Kinda similar, but reverse, of how true lasers work. Back and forth reflection, eventually most of the light escapes, just in my hack test example it scatters everywhere, rather than in one direction.

There’s plenty enough knowledge and technology in illumination that there should be no reason for such large headlight assemblies to be shooting out all that light from something about the size of a postit…