Ha! Now it works. Now that you explicitly referred to RGBA, I did exactly that with the RGBA example from THREE. Then I will probably upload two repositories to github later.
The geometry is now completely made up of the coordinates of the DataTexture. I also used the coordinates as color weighting in the fragment shader. The black quadrant is -x, -z, so is black. In the direction of +x, +z it becomes more and more colored
Here the repository: