0.0001 BTC is only four and a half cents ($0.045).  The transaction fee is a deterrent from creating a bunch of spam transactions, so it is a very good thing.  

In a practical setting, the value of the "color" transferred should be much larger than the transaction fee.  The fact that only 6 bits actually got sent is not the point.  The point was to transfer ownership of the digital assets.  

It typically costs over $100 to transfer assets such as shares between brokerage accounts--that's at least 2000 times more expensive than transferring shares using open-assets.