In recent work, we employed one such automated approach, approximate pair coefficient (APC) active space selection, on the extensive QUESTDB database of accurate vertical excitation energies for small-to-medium-sized organic systems. Through this, we were able to carry out extensive benchmarking of post-CAS methods such as n-electron valence perturbation theory (NEVPT2) and multiconfigurational pair-density functional theory (MC-PDFT) using the translated PBE (tPBE) functional by using the active spaces generated by the automated approach. However, in order to separate errors in these post-CAS methods due to a poor active space from errors occurring even with good active spaces, we considered only the active spaces for which the state-averaged CASSCF (SA-CASSCF) result was within 1.1 eV of the best estimate from the database. Depending on the active-space size and the basis set, this criterion was satisfied for 363-436 (68-82%) of the 532 excitations in the database. Although the APC scheme for these cases proved to be competitive with active spaces selected by hand, the very high error (sometimes greater than 5 eV) of the results obtained in the remaining active spaces (18-32% of the excitations) remained unacceptable for predictive work.