Hey I'm sure you moved on to the forwarder (as one should noted by starcher), but if anyone else stumbles upon this I thought I should post up the answer.
This is likely a SELinux problem; it will block outgoing connections on "non-standard" ports on a per-server basis. To fix, you'll need to add your custom port to the service definition for syslog (rsyslog is launched as syslog for policy purposes) or disable SELinux. To test without rebooting, you can try the command setenforce 0 (not persistent across reboots). If it works after that, there's your problem. I might write up a tutorial post later, if so I'll circle back and link it.
That said, I'm moving on to the forwarder as starcher suggests; just couldn't let this one go due to its odd behavior!
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