Brentwood to Liverpool Street return

I have another query about fares between Brentwood and London…

Looking at the fare finder, the single peak fare between Brentwood and Liverpool Street is £11.20 (as it is to any zone 1 station), so a return with both legs at peak time is £22.40.

However, a paper anytime return ticket from Brentwood to Liverpool Street only seems to cost £21.30. My suspicion is that this is because the paper fare was frozen but the Oyster fare wasn’t (last year’s Oyster single fare was £10.60, which comes just under half the paper return ticket) but as far as I can tell this makes it more than £1/day cheaper for a peak-time commuter to buy paper return tickets for this journey than to pay the full Oyster fare.

It’s long been the case that paper tickets are cheaper for people with 16-25 or 26-30 railcards since they can be used in the morning peak subject to a £12 minimum fare (and this return ticket is comfortably above that!) but not for people paying the full adult fare. If the journey goes further into zone 1 then the paper return ticket goes up to £24.70, so Oyster/Contactless is cheaper unless you have a railcard.

I realise that capping might help reduce the impact of this, though the zone 1-9 cap of £23.30 is still above the cost of a simple return journey. I’m not sure if I might be missing something here, since I’d have expected something like this might have been noticed already?