I found Norton to be more trouble than it is worth. At one time, it was the gold standard. Now I don't know whether it is any better than other offerings, but it does not play well with others. I repeatedly ran into problems with software not working on my system, only to discover the problem was Norton. I finally just removed it.
MBAM has a good reputation and doesn't produce a lot of false positives. I would apply the same rule as for old stuff in your refrigerator--when in doubt, throw it out. PUPs can almost always be safely discarded. If it is legit software and important software, the odds are pretty low that it will be flagged. Almost by definition, anything that is a PUP is probably not important software.
If you want a simple approach, just let the AV software do its thing and accept its judgement. The actions are governed by rules that have been developed by teams of people whose job is to be experts in malware, and the occasional false positives get reported and corrected. Even if you take the time to research each hit, you will rarely find that the AV software was wrong, or that the level of response (delete, quarantine, or notify), was inappropriate. If you do experience a legit program being falsely quarantined or deleted, there is a near zero chance that it will be any of your critical software. It is far more likely that you will never miss it.
You are probably focusing on the wrong side of the equation. The truly important issue is preventing real malware. The cost of that is dealing with some level of false positives. The safest and least stressful approach is to do the most thorough possible job of preventing malware and then deal with the resulting false positives, whatever that turns out to be, in the least stressful, most convenient way. Don't design your process to minimize false positives, design it to expect false positives as a good thing and to cope with them in a way that's best for you. Even if you just give the AV software a free hand to delete or quarantine as it sees fit, it will be truly rare that you have to restore something important. If you do, it will be a lot easier and faster than trying to recover from a malware infection.