Thanks, Derek.
Your explanation makes perfect sense now. The left feature is very basic so it the POST url is under the 2k character threshhold. The right feature has about 35 vertices due to the curves. I looked at the POST info and the vertex coordinate pairs are almost 40 characters long so I'm already at about 700 characters with just the definition of the linear feature.
I'm not currently specifying a proxy using esri.config.defaults.io.proxyUrl but I'll be working with my IT to finally get that set up.
Thanks again!
Steve