Trying to make a belt embelishment holes with a curve repeaters nodes alignments snap etc

I am trying to make a belt using curve repaters for the holes and embellishments.
I did manage to make one but it was kind of a mess so I decided to start from scratch.
My issues are with nodes alignments. How can I have all the nodes on the same plane, meaning a location and not specifically a plane object. The belt it self I made it by cloning and cutting the pants.
Then I added a curve with torus and repeated it in the curve for the for the metal rings and then another curve with balls repeated to make the holes.
But it was a very painfull and messy process, adjusting every little object individually by hand.
How can I get it to snap to an horizontal plane and to an object surface at the same time?
In the first one I had to ajust all of the torus circles by hand individually as the circle that then will make the hole.
Now I added a plane with the hope of getting the nodes flat on it surface and also flat on the belt surface but is not working. It snaps on the belt but does not snap on the plane.
Is there a faster more acurate way to do this?