Using box morph base plane for attractor reference?

I've been trying to skin an arbitrary surface (for the time being) with a form similar to sound dampening baffles and have come up with some questions i'm hoping to get answered. 

1. When I made the skin and applied the divided sbox's to it, the boxes were populated on the wrong side... I applied a -1 multiplier to the height of the boxes so that they were in effect reversed to the other side. Is there a better way to do this?

2. When the attractor is applied the populated forms skew out of the surface plane. I surmise that this is because i'm using a plane within the box morph that is flat but the box morph is warped, thus causing the erratic scaling. Is there a way I can use the base of the morph box as the plane?

Thanks in advance.

Paul