The lease is set to the standard 30. I've never bumped into this problem with any of the various servers I've had before and I'm using the absolute vanilla install of a fresh key. Just started playing around last night.
Thanks for the suggestion. While banging my head against the wall earlier I did that and...of course... it works just fine and things go back to sane. I can't seem to figure out what's causing dhcpcd to freak out.