the 'R' should be dropped to stay in line with the fact you 'sync' your portage tree, you dont 'rsync' it ... helps us to get away from `emerge rsync` and in the future when we support syncing with cvs/cvsup/svn/etc...
They only apply to rsync operations... sync is not necessarily rsync, and vice versa.
retries can be applied to any operation ... timeout can be handled in portage (although probably just with hacks) ... and assuming other sync cmds can handle timeouts ... exclusion may be a feature of more than 1 app, just diff format ...
Retries for rsync might be different than what you want for wget... Timeout for rsync might be considerably longer or shorter than wget... If the format differs, there really isn't a point in having them be the same.
