Well, when you use Starling you probably don't render in the same way the spine-starling does. We need to draw by specifying vertices, not by using the SRT of the Image class, because the quadrilateral we are drawing may not be rectangle. I guess this is pretty esoteric usage in Starling, but I'm surprised there's no help on the forums yet.
I have debugged the color, even hardcoded values, and spine-starling still draws as if white was used. I haven't had a chance to look at how Flash using spine-as3 works, but once I do I'll respond to you on that github issue. 🙂