With the motivation of the previous paragraph, we present here a method for (a) efficiently generating a series of trial CAS wave functions for each excitation, and then (b) choosing between these wave functions with a facile evaluation criteria. To achieve (a), we select 40orbital active spaces using APC active space selection on sets of orbitals generated through the diagonalization of different exchange-weighted operators λ; for (b), we select the CAS wave function which has the lowest MC-PDFT energy averaged over the two states involved in the transition, which we call variational selection with tPBE. We refer to the scheme in total as "λAPC-tPBE", and find that on a test set of 199 vertical excitations from QUESTDB, this approach is able to reproduce the results of our previous benchmark of post-CAS methods with only 4 values of λ, and without the need to exclude any excitations due to poor active space selection. Furthermore, we show the robustness of variational selection with tPBE in selecting between active spaces of vastly different sizes, over and above variational selection using the wave function (CASCI/DMRG-CASCI) absolute energy.