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Some interesting comments. But I suspect that if you continued to read the two you might find that you aren't as far apart as you might think.

I'll give you some examples that come to mind from what you have said.

First of all, you mentioned:
They see the past, apparently, through gauze, or a lens wiped in vaseline. Their stated concern is the preservation of the ideals and values of the past. But, obviously, not just any past; motivated as they both were by a love of liberty, and of morality, they were choosy about which past they wanted to preserve. So, again, we are not on opposite sides of any divide.

But I look back and see barbarism, and monstrous evil, and chaos, and I see valiant struggles to overcome those. Where they see a culture that is basically good, I see a culture that is deeply flawed, and that in every generation the highest calling is to reject conformity, to reject the evil of the dominant culture, and to struggle always forward.

Your use of "gauze" is interesting. From Burke during the Impeachment of Hastings we have an illustration of his use of a "veil" drawn over historical foundings:

There is a sacred veil to be drawn over the beginning of all governments. Ours in India had an origin like those which time has sanctified by obscurity. Time, in the origin of most governments, has thrown this mysterious veil over them; prudence and discretion make it necessary to throw something of the same drapery over more recent foundations, in which otherwise the fortune, the genius, the talents, and military virtue of this nation never shone more conspicuously. But whatever necessity might hide or excuse or palliate, in the acquisition of power, a wise nation, when it has once made a revolution upon its own principles and for its own ends, rests there.

He uses this imagery a number of times in his life.

The Cambridge History of American and English Liturature summarizes how this applies better than I can:

It is in his attack on the abstract and individualistic doctrine of the “rights of man” that Burke develops most fully this philosophy of society, and breaks most decisively with the mechanical and atomic political theory which, inherited from Locke, had dominated the thought of the eighteenth century. Over against the view of the state as the product of a “contract” among individuals, whose “rights” exist prior to that contract, and constitute the standard by which at every stage the just claim of society on the individual is to be tested, he develops the conception of the individual as himself the product of society, born to an inheritance of rights (which are “all the advantages” for which civil society is made) and of reciprocal duties, and, in the last resort, owing these concrete rights (actual rights which fall short in perfection of those ideal rights “whose abstract perfection is their practical defect”) to convention and prescription. Society originates not in a free contract but in necessity, and the shaping factor in its institutions has not been the consideration of any code of abstract pre-existent rights (“the inherent rights of the people”) but “convenience.” And, of these conveniences or rights, two are supreme, government and prescription, the existence of “a power out of themselves by which the will of individuals may be controlled,” and the recognition of the sacred character of prescription. In whatever way a particular society may have originated—conquest, usurpation, revolution (“there is a sacred veil to be drawn over the beginnings of all government”)—in process of time, its institutions and rights come to rest upon prescription. In any ancient community such as that of France or Britain, every constituent factor, including what we choose to call the people, is the product of convention. The privileges of every order, the rights of every individual, rest upon prescription embodied in law or established by usage. This is the “compact or agreement which gives its corporate form and capacity to a state,” and, if it is once broken, the people are a number of vague, loose individuals and nothing more. Alas! they little know how many a weary step is to be taken before they can form themselves into a mass which has a true politic personality. 6
There is, therefore, no right of revolution, or rebellion at will. The “civil, social man” never may rebel except when he must rebel. Revolution is always the annulment of some rights. It will be judged in the last resort by the degree in which it preserves as well as destroys, and by what it substitutes for what it takes away. At its best, revolution is “the extreme medicine of the constitution,” and Burke’s quarrel with the Assembly is that they have made it “its daily bread”; that, when the whole constitution of France was in their hands to preserve and to reform, they elected only to destroy.

So, like you, Burke acknowledges the "barbarism" or chaos present at all initial creations and sensibly chooses to draw a veil over it and see the good that the work of generations has done in its wake. Seeing it and its value he feels we muct continue a careful, prudent path of reform and work to keep ever striving forward in careful improvement.

Kirk likewise speaks (in my link to Ten Principles)to change and continued reform of human institutions:

"Tenth, the thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society.... The conservative knows that any healthy society is influenced by two forces, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge called its Permanence and its Progression.... He thinks that the liberal and the radical, blind to the just claims of Permanence, would endanger the heritage bequeathed to us, in an endeavor to hurry us into some dubious Terrestrial Paradise. The conservative, in short, favors reasoned and temperate progress; he is opposed to the cult of Progress, whose votaries believe that everything new necessarily is superior to everything old."

Likewise you mention "tradition":
If I value any traditional culture, it is only that tradition of noble struggle, which is a only a very definite subset of the larger culture.

I have long believed that we are on this earth to build, to create, to seek truth, and never ever rest on the received truths of generations past. America was formed by people who rejected the traditions of the ages, who came here specifically because they couldn't abide being smothered by social and economic and political stagnation another day, even if they lost their lives in some nameless place on the frontier.

So when Kirkean conservatives start going on about preserving the traditions of past generations, I get the hives; I can't help but think that my people left Europe, and the east coast, and the old south, moving ever westward just to get away from all of that. To be free to invent oneself anew in accordance with one's own principles, without the received traditions of oligarchs and royalists and slavers to distort one's conscience and stunt your existence.

Now, it might interest you that when Kirk, in his last formal formulation of a summary of conservative principles (again, see the link) in the early nineties, speaks of things established deserving of consideration he does not use the word "tradition" for the very reasons you outline. He speaks of:

"Second, the conservative adheres to custom, convention, and continuity", not slavishly, for he recognizes room for improvement in all things human, but humbly, for he recognizes also that wisdom grows slowly through ages, and because he prefers the devil he knows to the devil he doesn't know.

It is important to me that he doesn't use that word. It is an acknowledgement that tradition alone is no sanctifier. The detail of his discussion in the book makes that clear as well.

As individuals, you and I are working for the future, for ourselves and for our progeny. Burke and Kirk, in the public arena surely, but scholars first, always have a grounding in history which makes their stated positions and the related foundations in history seem to be always pointing to the past. But forward thinking was really the essence of both men to me and I suggest that as you continue to look over their works you will find the same.

Their hopes for the future are as great as ours; their fear of the methods of expediant men is greater. They fear the armed doctrine and the false promise to give us a terrestrial paradise--salvation on earth rather than in heaven.