PDT allows Zen Cart to talk to PayPal and confirm that payment was received without having to wait for the normal IPN notification to be sent to your store from PayPal.
Sometimes the IPN process can be delayed and unreliable. Enabling PDT can sometimes alleviate the pain associated with the delays.
However, it's not 'required'.
Nowadays, as far as I can tell, the difference is minimal, if any.
It used to be necessary to ensure your transactions were hitting the correct servers for processing.
Nowadays I'm pretty sure it's not important.
If someone places an order and pays for it via PayPal, and then you later go and refund all or part of that payment, your order's status will be switched to whichever status you have the Refund Order Status set to, when the Refund IPN notification from PayPal's server is sent to your server.




