RQM test case life-cycle management

I am leading a project to look to adopting RQM, I now have about 3 weeks remaining in which to demonstrate that we can go into production with RQM to track and report on our test results.
One key thing I need to show is how life-cycle management is supposed to work.
What I mean by this is how do things progress as we move down releases. We are already a mature product with many thousands of test cases in a 'regression bucket'
and each release we create more as new function tests.
In a given release we need to track the progress of new function tests separately to regression. And those people that are tracking regression are managing an ever increasing quantity of tests.
At the end of a release, how do I start the next? I can see there are 'snapshots' which might be the key, but there doesn't seem to be much written about them aside from how to create them.
Should I snapshot all plans, create copies, then make the copies applicable to the next release?
Or completely copy the whole project space to another with which to track the next version?

How do I pass release 1.0 across to the team who will manage it from a service perspective, continuing to run and track tests, whilst the development organisation moves on to 1.1 expecting a fresh set of executionresults and all last releases plans to exist as regression?

Additionally we often have to manage change to our environment during a release, a new OS version might arrive and need to be supported. How do I add a TER for this new environment across what might be thousands of test cases in dozens of plans?

Any advice on the 'right' way to manage an RQM project as we move from one release to the next of our product would be much appreciated.