datepicker has Today() as value, not the datetime in the fields

My question is two-fold and may have one answer. I got my date fields to sort like I want in the table with moment.js - very cool. But, when I edit one of those values the editor show today's date in YYYY-MM-YYT00:00:00 format and ignore the field's current value

What am I missing? And how can I get just MM/DD/YYYY format of a sql server datetime field? The field is defined as:
{"label": "start_date", "name": "start_date", "type": "datetime" } I have tried adding a "format":"MM/DD/YYYY" which is ignored.

Thanks for any suggestions you might have.
Sean