Redmine

Hi,
I want to use Redmine to support a small firm whose business is HW/SW development.

I found ways to do almost all I need, only two items remain (partly) unsolved.

A bit of backgroound:
The firm works on PROJECTS, each having a defined set of administrator, budget, developers, ... Some resource could be shared between these top-level PROJECTS.
Opening a top-level PROJECT is a complex issue that should not be available to anyone but the management, not even to project adminstrators.
Each top-evel PROJECT has a rather complex structure and includes several "standard" subprojects (e.g.: Specifiactions, HW development, SW development, Documentation, ...).

Issue 1: I need a "canned" way to produce such an "empty/standard PROJECT". I didn't find an easy way to do a "deep copy" of a project in redmine, so I'm currently exploring the REST API; is this the Right Way to do what I need?

Issue 2: AFAIK each subproject in RedMine is really apart from all others and the tree structure is only an artifact to find them easily. Is this correct?
I would need to have a real tree structure i.e.: any issue of a subproject is ALSO an issue for it's parent and for the parent's parent, up to the top level.
Same thing for Documents, Wiki pages and everything else, including SCM repositories.
Is there any reasonably easy way to achieve this?

I am a reasonably seasoned programmer and I know a lot of different languages, but these include neither Ruby nor Rails, unfortunately, so any sizeable development effort would incur in a heavy initial learning curve.
Can someone advise on the best course? I know too little about Redmine innards to make a sensible guess, I fear.

Thanks in Advance.
Mauro