Lightning is a series of gump images, not an animated static like all the other effects.
The BoltEffect packet is a copy of a hued effect packet, but lightning uses a different flag within that packet.
When the client interprets the packet, it ignores the hue part of the data.
All the other spell effects can be hued fine because they are statics.
The BoltEffect method has a hue argument because it wants to taunt you with what could have been.