Following the tutorial here: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/logstash/5.0/installing-logstash.html
I installs LS via the yum repo, and I think the location of the conf files got confused. I have an /etc/logstash/config that's empty. But it seems most of the errors I've seen logged want them in /usr/share/logstash/config, which did not exist until my troubleshooting this earlier this morning.
So I have copied the log4j2.properties and a conf file I generated from the examples listed on that site above. But I still feel as though something is wrong.