I have really tried to push them to just do Audit log collection from the DCs (plus log endpoint logs). However, for some reason, they are requiring ALL logs. It is pretty frustrating to try and get them to work with us.
While I agree that your AD to ESM suggestion would work, they state that too many machines are being brough into the environment and taken out of the environment that it would be "unmanageable" to keep the list of hosts up to date. I think for this deployment the centralized logging using WEF is our best bet.
Thank you everyone for the responses! Awesome little community here!