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That's exactly what got Skype banned on our university's network back when it still used to do that, because otherwise supernode traffic would have taken a significant portion of the uplink bandwdith.

Skype did that, Windows (lol) nodes with good up times and bandwidth were autopromoted as supernodes. This makes the network unfair tho, and encourages these users to use alternatives clients to prevent being a supernode (wasted bandwidth and cpu: who wants this?)

You could refrain from becoming a supernode by disabling "Allow direct IP connections" in the Skype settings - but personally I didn't mind.

In that case, how do you distribute the IPs of supernodes to new clients, other than hardcoding them into the download binary?

Tor has the same problem; it solves it partially by hardcoding directory authorities, and partially with bridges that are distributed offline.