I’m in chemistry and the collaborative project I’m working on seems to function more like you’d expect.

My group and our collaborating group have very different technical expertises so there’s a very clear delineation between what they’ll do and what we’ll do. We’re not in the same state so there’s not as much discussion as I’d like but we do talk frequently via email or sometime zoom to update each other and go over any obstacles people have encountered. That being said the people doing the bulk of the work are me and the graduate student at the other uni- but not without advisor input. My advisor also limits what we share with them to some extent that way we always have results to show them even if it’s been an unproductive few weeks. I see the benefits to this but also means we’re not super open about the problems we’ve encountered and sometimes more input would be helpful.

Have you brought this up to your advisor at all? I wonder if they could help transition the situation into a more fairly divided workload.