In my experience, the best thing you can do to keep yourself safe is use private trackers. With these you're extremely unlikely to get a DMCA request/ISP notice. You also get higher quality torrents that are uploaded in a more timely manner and seeded better. One downside is that you have to seed, but I have seeded constantly for years from multiple ISPs and have had no issues ever.

I'm gradually transitioning away from a desktop based setup to a raspi based one. I'm planning on using deluge/transmission, as many others in this thread have mentioned. I'm going to setup a webUI so that adding torrents is stupidly easy. The raspi will also function as a network share, so anyone on my network can stream/drop content. I was also considering writing a command line tool to grab torrents from private trackers and add them to the seedbox, so that I could share my account on those trackers with the people I live with. This is technically against the rules of private trackers, but I don't think there would be any way to tell that I was using this for multiple users.

With this setup, I might end up running all of my traffic through a VPN, as my current ISP shapes torrent traffic, so I could probably get better seeds setting up a VPN on Digital Ocean or some other cloud/VPN provider.