hello,
I thought I had understood what it was doing, but recently discovered I was completely wrong so knowing that there are a ton of plugins out there that disable this wpautop function, could someone please explain a bit what exactly it is doing?
format paragraphs, remove dup or empty tags, filter out all but authorized tags and attributes.
I wouldn't remove it.
how would this be related, if at all, to the kses.php file which removes tags that are not allowed? in which order do these to apply?
I think wp-autop is more of a markup /unnecessary tags check while kses is really security-oriented. I can't be 100% positive though.